A 90’s Type of Love

Marlon Ellis is fifty-four years old, the man who owns the recording studio on the West Side of Dayton, and after a divorce that took him clean off his feet he had settled into a life measured out in records, pen-and-paper journals, yellow sticky notes around the edge of his screen and phone calls that run long enough to hear a person’s whole life in their voice. Simone Taylor is twenty years younger, an Instagram kind of woman who swipes first and asks questions later, but she is curious about the old ways in a way that catches him off guard, and somewhere between her world and his the two of them grow into a kind of love he never thought he had any business having again.

A 90’s Type of Love is told in turns by Marlon and Simone, and it doesn’t lean on the old pattern where a couple breaks up so the story can bring them back together. The pressure here comes from real life, from family on both sides, from the history each of them carries into the room and from the kind of hard season that tests whether two people meant what they said, while the commitment between them holds as the backbone of the whole book.

The story moves through Dayton’s funk heritage, nineties R&B and the songs that come to mean something different every time a couple plays them again, from the first long conversation all the way to a wedding on the beach in Barbados and the family that comes after it.