I’ve been in love with you since I was twenty-one years old. I might not wear the ring, but that doesn’t mean I don’t feel it there.”
HOLY WOW!!!
This was one of the most AMAZING, BEAUTIFUL, ROMANTIC book I’ve read all year and I had the happiest of happy tears streaming down my face when I finished it!! It’s a story of love, loss, marriage, family, and second chances. It felt so believable, so real, so deeply romantic. The story was compelling and utterly addictive in every way. I cancelled dinner plans so I could finish reading this without stopping. As soon as I started reading it, I felt connected to these characters, and I just couldn’t stop flipping those pages. I ABSOLUTELY LOVED THIS BOOK!!!
Not only is the actual story in this book truly wonderful, but its blurb is actually one of my favorites as well — it totally gives you that little jolt of intrigue at the end so I think that the best intro to this story you can get is just to read the blurb for yourselves:
“Molly Alcott didn’t expect to open her mailbox one summer morning and find an old letter stuffed between bills and a supermarket flyer. Penned in familiar handwriting, dated over fifteen years ago, the letter was written to Molly after her first date with the man she’ll never forget.
Week after week, new letters appear. Each marks an event in the history of their epic love affair. Each heals a wound. Each holds the confession of the man who still owns Molly’s heart.
The letters are full of promise, hope and love, but truth be told, Molly wishes she could unread them all.
Because the man who wrote these letters is not the one sending them.”
This story begins more than six years after their divorce. Long enough for them to have (at least superficially) not healed but grown accustomed to their hurt and for them to have made strides in trying to move forward with their lives. It was long enough for the reader to realize that their pain went deep but it was undeniable that their feelings for each other were still there, beneath the hurt. Long enough to realize that the fact that that love was still there between them meant that they had something worth saving. (Btw, this is not a love triangle.)
“I’ll always be sorry.” I kept a firm grip on her hand, not wanting her to pull away. “I’m sorry, Molly.”
“I get it,” she whispered. “It hurts. But I get it. It makes me wish we had talked more.”
“Me too.”
… She gave my fingers a squeeze, then unlaced our hands… It felt like there was more to say. That one apology wasn’t enough.
So I’d give her others, every day until the heaviness in my heart was unloaded.
I loved the letters — they were so raw and real — they shared an honesty that people often reserve for diaries and confidants and you could feel the emotions so strongly in each one. Both the good and the bad.
The one thing I feel like I’m just repeating because it’s just so very true is how REAL this story felt. The mistakes, the misunderstandings, they were so believable and I really loved that no one person within their marriage was either the aggressor or victim — there was no “bad guy” in what led to their divorce, but rather it was a complicated accumulation of many smaller things, unanticipated things that weren’t even meant to cause hurt — but not one of the reasons, on either side, was ever a lack of love for each other.
I wanted to hold her. To tell her that she was the most incredible woman I’d ever known. To ask her if she thought we might have the energy to give us another go. To promise I’d never stop loving her, that she’d owned my heart since the day we met.
The characters in this book are strongly interconnected with The Birthday List (my review), which I also really loved. The hero of this book is brother to the heroine of the previous book and as such their families and stories influence each other a lot. You do not have to read TBL before reading this one though — this could very easily be read as a full standalone — however, I personally loved both books and would highly recommend them both. And if you’re planning to read both, you may as well read them in order and get the full experience of these two stories.
Stories revolving around family and marriages are often among my favorites because there’s so much history involved and so many layers of emotion, so much depth. Gah, and the epilogue was PERFECT!!
This is a book you’ll want to cancel plans to finish reading, a book that’ll steal your heart and make you believe it’s real. It’s a beautiful, heart-warming second chance romance and the kind of story that you’ll want to tell all your friends to read. So this is me telling you, my lovely book friends, to READ THIS BOOK!!! I highly recommend it!
Rating: 5 STARS!! Contemporary Adult Romance, can standalone.
*** MAYSEN JAR SERIES ***
Series of interconnected standalones.
Alison says
OMG your review’s got me hooked on to Devney Perry in the first place – so thank you for that & like always get me excited for the next one!!
Aestas says
I’m so glad to hear that!! This one is worth getting excited for 😀
Nadia says
I loved it, I couldn’t stop reading it, it is so beautiful and you can put yourself in their place and feel how they fall in love again and put their problems aside to heal their love story