Christina Lauren is the pen name of writing partners/best friends Christina Hobbs and Lauren Billings, the New York Times, USA Today, and #1 internationally bestselling authors of twenty-eight books, including the Beautiful and Wild Seasons series, The Unhoneymooners, Love and Other Words, In a Holidaze, and The Soulmate Equation. Find them at ChristinaLaurenBooks.com or @ChristinaLauren on Instagram and Twitter. You can find more of my reviews of their work here.
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 . . . only to break it on the very night he declared his love for her. Told in alternating time lines between then and now, teenage Elliot and Macy grow from friends to much more—spending weekends and lazy summers together in a house outside 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.
Conceptually, Love and Other Words is such a strong story. Two bookish neighbors fall in love over reading retreats in their library closet, bonding over all that is awkward and embarrassing about growing up. After something that happened between them in the past, though, they have been estranged from one another, only to be reunited many years later and forced to reckon with that past. I love the focus on Macy and Elliot bonding over books, as of course any book lover would find that a swoony detail. Macy and Elliot are also able to be honest with one another when they aren't with other. This makes it believable that of course there's no one in the world for either of them. The childhood-friends-to-lovers trope is what really makes this story work as well as it does.
In the acknowledgements, Christina Lauren suggests that this book is more women's fiction than romance; and I think for me, that is where my disconnect with this book is. I thought it would be contemporary romance (the cover redesign really got me here, as well as my previous experience with all of CLo's books), when it really was missing something that would allow it to fully fall into that category. I also think that because the most compelling part of the story was when Elliot and Macy were teenagers, and most of the romantic scenes were when they were young, too, threw me off. It made me think it could have almost been young adult literature, had the authors veered just one step off course. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, I just do think my expectations were a bit different, and the book wasn't contemporary romance the way I'd grown to expect from Christina Lauren.
This story is told with two timelines: the first, in the past, when Elliot and Macy just met one another and fell in love during their teenage years; the second, in the present, when the two reunite after eleven years apart. This structure allows for readers to wonder what happened between Elliot and Macy all those years ago, and we work towards that emotional center of the story all the way to the end. A sort of mystery surrounding the cloud of all these tense emotions makes for a compelling storyline. In my opinion, Love and Other Words is what It Ends With Us wishes it was. And that's the tea!
I adore all of Christina Lauren's works, because how could I not? I am so excited for their forthcoming titles, and can't get enough of their backlist, especially the ones with these redesigned covers. Until I can get my hands on more of their works, you can find them online at ChristinaLaurenBooks.com or @ChristinaLauren on Instagram and Twitter. You can find more of my reviews of their work here.
*This review can also be found on my Goodreads page*
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