Hello there, bookworms! Happy Friday! To those of you who celebrated the holiday yesterday, I hope you all had a wonderful Thanksgiving with family, friends, good food, and a long, well-deserved nap! I also hope you have a weekend full of books and relaxation indoors.
Yet another crazy week has passed, and we’re now officially in the holiday season! I may or may not have a mini-stack of Christmas-themed books stacked up already, and I’m looking forward to powering down for a bit soon. I need some time to hibernate and charge my batteries before I head back into the new year. Anyway, I’m putting the pressure on to get some long overdo book reviews out to you guys. It’s starting to get crazy how far behind I am on posts here.
I plan to remedy that situation now by bringing you a review for one of my favorite books this year. Let’s talk about Love and Other Words by the uber-talented duo, Christina Lauren!
If you know me or follow this blog, you know how much I adore everything these ladies write, and this book is no different. One of my closest friends read it ages ago and kept telling me I must get to it, but since the motto of my life seems to be, “I’m behind on things”, it took me awhile to get around to read. Thankfully, I finally completed this gem last month and let me just tell you… oh. my. goodness!
Love, loss, friendship, and the betrayals of the past all collide in this first fiction novel from New York Times and #1 international bestselling author Christina Lauren (Autoboyography, Dating You / Hating You).
The story of the heart can never be unwritten.
Macy Sorensen is settling into an ambitious if emotionally tepid routine: work hard as a new pediatrics resident, plan her wedding to an older, financially secure man, keep her head down and heart tucked away.
But when she runs into Elliot Petropoulos—the first and only love of her life—the careful bubble she’s constructed begins to dissolve. Once upon a time, Elliot was Macy’s entire world—growing from her gangly bookish friend into the man who coaxed her heart open again after the loss of her mother…only to break it on the very night he declared his love for her.
Told in alternating timelines between Then and Now, teenage Elliot and Macy grow from friends to much more—spending weekends and lazy summers together in a house outside of San Francisco devouring books, sharing favorite words, and talking through their growing pains and triumphs. As adults, they have become strangers to one another until their chance reunion. Although their memories are obscured by the agony of what happened that night so many years ago, Elliot will come to understand the truth behind Macy’s decade-long silence, and will have to overcome the past and himself to revive her faith in the possibility of an all-consuming love.
There’s not much to say other than I absolutely devoured this book. Once I began reading, I couldn’t stop. I lost sleep and I dragged myself into the land of the living the following day, and also felt myself in a literary stupor for some time after I closed the back cover.
This is one of the few books I’ve read that when I left it, I felt I was putting it back on my shelf with a little more weight to it from the journey we shared together. I adored the angst, the tension building up to young love, the two kids who hid in closets reading books and picking their favorite words blossoming into something truly inseparable. Elliot and Macy have a long road ahead of them to figure out life and all its challenges, and the road to bliss is not a smooth or easy one. They have their fair share of broken moments that leave you aching and wondering if they’ll ever have their ending tied up in a sweet, little bow, and all I can say is, it’s worth the adventure they take you on.
Love and Other Words is a book I wish I was clever or poetic enough to write. This is the sort of enchanting tale I would want to tell, so I must tip my hat to the powerful pair of Christina Lauren for publishing another beautiful, wonderful, perfect story. Every word on every page from star-to-finish was my favorite and I so envy their talents to produce such magic!
If you have not, please please please do yourselves a favor and go read this book! You won’t regret it!
My Final Rating: five out of five stars
