Reviews
Simple read with some character development but not near as much as I had anticipated.
Perfect if you are looming for a storyline straight out of a 90s romcom, but Jenkins Reid’s sharp emotional insight elevates the boom into something genuinely compelling.
Thanks, I’m sobbing. Maybe because I’ve been going through something very similar. But, was this not real, and something you can take with you in life moving forward.
good story about relationships and their complexities. Love Taylor Jenkins Reid always
This was my firs TJR read and i’m definitely gonna check out the rest of her books. This book was heartbreaking and for awhile i wasn’t sure who the FMC was going to end up with. Wasn’t looking forward to being happy for one and sad for the other. near the end it was very clear and i was rooting for their happiness. in the end it was a happy ending for everyone and that’s all that matters
This one was so good. I really enjoyed reading this book and while I feel like I’ve heard the plot of this book before in a movie or a different book. I was curious to see what would happen by the end of the book but also predicted what was going to happen too. So while I figured what would happen I still enjoyed the book and the rollercoaster story that I definitely recommend for everyone to read.
i was kinda disappointed reading this, i felt like i shouldve felt more connected to emma but the writing left me feeling disconnected and like i was an outsider looking in. it was hard to feel what was happening and even if the storyline is predictable it couldve been executed better.
what i DID like was the point of how you can change, multiple versions of you can exist in a lifetime and that is not contradictory at all. two things can be true at once!
This went way easier for Emma than I thought it would
Amazing!! Lives up to the hype for sure.
insert blonde girl crying clutching her throat gif
im team jesse i hate sam feel like hes ugly
this book breaks you in all the best ways. taylor jenkins reid, you are simply amazing.
c’est quand que tjr arrête de me faire chialer toutes les larmes de mon corps ???
this book is a whole package. 11 out of 10. but one thing if i really could change is, to get a lot more moment with sam, it feels so unfair to me how the majority plot was about jesse than it is about sam. i miss him more now than i ever be. i need some parts of him for me to take home to, to love him more, to praise him, to remembering how selfless he'd be. but yes, other than that, it's magnificent. this book teaches me a lot. like, a lot.
this book broke my heart. i adore you taylor jenkins reid <3
if this book ended with a polyamorous relationship, i wouldn't be mad
“True love doesn’t always last,” I say. “It doesn’t always have to be for a lifetime.” “Right. And that doesn’t mean it’s not true love,” Gahhh this was an emotional rollercoaster! I am glad I picked this book again after putting it on hold for almost a year. Very beautiful story that teach me some people are not destined to be with us for all eternity, and even relationships are over it doesn't have to mean we didn't love or care about them anymore; we do, but in different way, because people change, we change. And that's okay.
** spoiler alert ** Just because something isn’t meant to last a lifetime doesn’t mean it wasn’t meant to be. We were meant to have been. I think it's predictable who Emma will end up with from the first chapter, which doesn't matter as the conflict was still interesting to read. But Emma's actions confused me like if she's already decided to be with that guy then why is she sleeping with another guy? 🤷♀️
A tug and a pull on the heart strings. The audiobook got me good and I like the narrator (she does a lot of Taylor Jenkins Reid’s books)
“you can’t capture love in a bottle. you can’t hold on to it with both hands and force it to stay with you.” yeah…. tjr you have done it again! 3.75 ⭐️
what would you do if your husband came back after you thought he was dead? what would you do if he called you while you were at dinner with your new fiancé? i would have no idea how to react. i got upset with emma for how she went about it, but i can’t even really blame her. she was put in a rough spot but she made it work. i absolutely loved both love interests & i didn’t know who i was rooting for! even now that i know who she ends up with, i’m still not sure if i’m happy about it. the book was a wild journey but i’m so glad i finally got a chance to read it. i ended it with tears streaming down my face 🥲 taylor jenkins reid has done it again
As sappy and predictable this book may be I truly loved it. The immense feelings of love and loss that I felt were quite overwhelming.
GAWH YES perfect ending would have been livid if it ended any other way then it did, I adore TJR she doesn’t miss and this is a perfect example of that. LOVE
Highlights
It's messy to love after heartbreak. It's painful and it forces you to be honest with yourself about who you ar You have to work harder to find the words for your feelings, because they don't fit into any prefabricated boxes.
Chp 39
We are two people who are madly in love with our old selves. And that is not the same as being in love. You can’t capture love in a bottle. You can’t hold on to it with both hands and force it to stay with you. What has happened to us is no one’s fault-neither of us did anything wrong-but when Jesse left, life took us in opposite directions and turned us into different people. We grew apart because we were apart.
Chp 33
People aren’t stagnant. We evolve in reaction to our pleasures and our pains.
Chp 33
It’s rare that you love the person who loves you, that you love only the person who loves only you. Otherwise, somebody’s heartbroken.
Chp32
It feels so good to flirt. No one ever talks about that. But in that moment, I felt like flirting was the very thing that made the world go around.
I don’t think that true love means your only love. I think true love means loving truly. Loving purely. Loving wholly.
Do you ever get over loss? Or do you just find a box within yourself, big enough to hold it? Do you just stuff it in there, push it down, and snap the lid on it? Do you just work, every day, to keep the box shut?
When you love someone, it seeps out of everything you do, it bleeds into everything you say, it becomes so ever-present, that eventually it becomes ordinary to hear, no matter how extraordinary it is to feel.
I decided to no longer wonder what would have happened if things had worked out differently. And instead, I would focus on what was in front of me. I would focus on reality instead of asking myself questions about fictions.
Flirting is probably just as much about falling in love with yourself as it is with someone else.
I will carry you in my heart always, but I cannot carry your loss on my back anymore. If I do, I'll never find any new joy for myself. I will crumble under the weight of your memory. I have to look forward, into a future where you cannot be. Instead of back, to a past filled with what we had. I have to let you go and I have to ask you to let me go.
Good things don't wait until you're ready. Sometimes they come right before, when you're almost there.
You know that you will never truly be free of the grief. You know that it is something you just learn to live with, something you manage.
You start to understand that grief is chronic. That it’s more about remission and relapse than it is about a cure. What that means to you is that you can’t simply wait for it to be over. You have to move through it, like swimming in an undertow.
I had predicted my life on the idea that I wanted to see everywhere extraordinary, but I’d come to realize that extraordinary is everywhere.
You can't capture love in a bottle. You can't hold on to it with both hands and force it to stay with you.
I liked the pain because the pain was you.
Hollow and empty are terrible ways to feel when you're used to being full of joy. But it's not bad when you're used to being full of pain.
Hollow feels okay.
Empty feels like a beginning.
Which is nice, because for so long you have felt like you were at the end.
I need everybody to understand that this is not "emo". It's real and important because real people really experience this.
I had predicated my life on the idea that I wanted to see everywhere extraordinary, but I'd come to realise that extraordinary is everywhere.
She read adult books and wrote poetry and had crushes on fictional characters instead of movie stars
Guilty
When you look back on your own timeline, there's a sharp spike somewhere along the way, some event that changed you, changed your life, more than others.
A moment that creates a "before" and an "after".
Yes
"Everything is going to be OK," he says to me before I fall asleep. But I'm not sure I believe him anymore.
honestly, after eveyrthing that’s happened, jesse isn’t emma’s person anymore. i think everyone needs their person at a specific time in their life, and once they change, they find new people, or maybe they go back to their person from another time in their life. emma and jesse were her past, her young adult and teenage life. but emma and sam, are forever, since they were kids they loved each other, and they still do.