When I sat down to write this review of Christina Lauren’s Love and Other Words, all I could think of was the scene in The Notebook when Ryan Gosling and Rachel McAdams get caught in the rain and have it out on the dock. You know the one, she asks, “Why didn’t you write me?!” He tells her he wrote her everyday, 365 letters. She’s flummoxed…and then he says, “It wasn’t over….it still isn’t over!!” I wail every time.
Love and Other Words, out today, elicits the same feeling. I absolutely loved this book. Love and Other Words gives you the feels, alllllll the feels, all the feels times infinity. I kid you not. For anyone who says, “Ehhh, I don’t really read women’s fiction, I say, when Christina Lauren writes it you do.” If you’re here for the romance, you’ll get it and more.
Told in alternating then-and-now timelines, we meet teenage Macy and Elliot as weekend neighbors in Healdsburg, and as adults who haven’t spoken for more than a decade, after a chance meeting in San Francisco. Christina Lauren captures the anticipation, nerves and hormones of adolescent love beautifully, with a realism that’s like a time machine back to your teenage years. As a reader, you experience and reflect on the bloom of young love at the same time.
In the now timeline, Macy’s doing her residency and living with Sean, who’s a successful artist. That it’s an easy, but boring relationship feels a little convenient, but the alternatives might have taken this into story into dealbreaker territory, at least for me.
As Christina Lauren’s first foray into women’s fiction, Love and Other Words is still very much in their wheel house. It taps into the emotional core of the story with ease. Very often, young Macy and Elliot are a lot more honest with each other than any of us can be as adults. Christina Lauren said they came up with these characters seven years ago, but you can see the progressive build in their books. It is time for Macy and Elliot. Get ready for a decent, but not perfect diagram, because I’m a nerd like that.
Sublime is missing, but go with me on this. The House was sort of its own YA/horror thing. The Beautiful and Wild Seasons series showed us again and again they know to write romance that singes your eyebrows off and makes you laugh; Autoboyography and Dating You Hating You added social issues to the mix. Roomies was somewhere in between: a romance, plus a heroine who’s closer with her uncles than her actual parents. But at heart, all are love stories.
Love and Other Words is the next evolution of Christina Lauren’s work. It taps everything they wrote before it. Love and Other Words adds rich emotional complexity as it captures how indelible experiences like first love, heartbreak, and loss bear out in life 10 years later. It packs a poignant emotional punch that leaves you longing….and hoping that Macy and Elliot can overcome what kept them from talking for a decade. Hoping that Macy’s entire world view about love isn’t misguided.
Love and Other Words is beautiful and heart-tugging and idealistic. I can already tell this is going to be a comfort read (not unlike watching The Notebook), that I come back to time and again. That I can drop into anywhere in the book and enjoy. Like the best love stories do, Love and Other Words resonates long after you’ve finished the last page.
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