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Review
4.5 stars!
I loved this one! A beautiful, slow-burning friends-to-lovers YA love story that becomes a swoony and emotional second-chance romance. Something different from CLo, but they nailed it!
This book is labelled ‘Women’s Fiction’, but have no fear, romance lovers, this is romance through and through! Not as steamy as we have come expect from these authors, but it definitely touched my romance-junkie heart, and I loved it.
Macy is a woman who, on the surface, seems to have her life together. She is engaged to be married to a successful older man who has a young daughter, and she is working her pediatric residency, a job that she loves and is wholly committed to. But in reality, she is a woman who is mostly closed off. She keeps her heart safely to herself, never really opening herself up to anybody and never really living, and she’s content with that. Until she unexpectedly runs into a ghost from her past.
Elliott was the boy who lived next door to Macy’s weekend/summer retreat home. Following the death of her mother when she was a child, Macy withdrew, and her father and her books were her whole world. Until she met Elliott. He was the boy who joined her in her world of books and words, bringing her back to life and becoming the rock she could lean on through her teenage years. They shared everything with each other as they grew up and experienced life, and they fell in love – soul-deep, life-changing, together-forever kind of love. But it fell apart, and now he’s back in her life and, no matter what happened between them in the past, he’s determined to stay.
“I loved you … You loved me, too, you know,” he says quietly. “It was everything.”
I feel as though I’ve been shoved, and push away from the table a little, but he leans in. “Sorry. This is too intense. I’m just terrified of not getting a chance to say it.”
The story is split into two parts, moving between the past and the present. The story of Macy and Elliott’s past is a beautiful YA friends-to-lovers romance that absolutely owned me. It’s sweet, funny, real and emotional, and it’s YA romance heaven! I could feel the connection between them, I loved watching them fall so hard and so completely for each other, and I wanted forever for them.
“So maybe your best everything should be your boyfriend.”
I stared at him and he stared at me.
I spoke without thinking. “Maybe.”
“Maybe,” he agreed in a whisper.
In the present, Elliott’s reappearance in Macy’s life opens up old wounds. Though they have both seemingly moved on, neither of them got over their separation, and there’s a whole lot of hurt and pain between them which brings a world of feels to their emotionally charged reunion.
“I never got to fall out of love. I just had to move on.”
I fell in instant love with Elliot. From the moment Macy re-entered his life, he made it clear that he still loved her and that he still wanted her, and the way he wore his heart on his sleeve for her was just beautiful. But Macy is a mess. Tragedy has left her emotionally scarred, and her separation from Elliot is a big part of that. There’s a lot for them to deal with, and though she has spent the last few years of her life holding everybody at arms’ length, Elliot being back forces her to examine her life and what she wants from it, and I thought that part of the story was really beautifully written.
He’s my person. He’s always been my person. My best friend, my confidant, probably the love of my life. And I’ve spent the last eleven years being angry and self-righteous. But at the end of the day, he tore a hole in us, and fate ripped it wide open.
The cause of their separation is a big mystery throughout the book, and while I was reading I kept developing theories as to what could have possibly torn these two apart. It’s an issue that a lot of other readers have had problems with, and I can absolutely understand why. It did seem completely out of character, but there’s a part of me that could buy into it. I could certainly understand the fallout and how everything became twisted the way it did. But, to me, the cause of their break wasn’t that big of an issue, I was more interested in watching them fall in love in the first place, and then watching them find their way back to each other as they worked through it all and rediscovered the magic that is them together, and that part of the story had me a swooning, emotional puddle of goo on the floor.
“I’ve been waiting for you to come home for eleven years.”
I loved it! I laughed, I cried and I swooned, and though I would have love an epilogue, I finished this book with a big grin on my face.
4.5 stars
An Advanced Review Copy was generously provided by the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.