Julie's Review: Who Do You Love

Author: Jennifer Weiner
Series: None
Publication Date: August 11, 2015
Publisher: Atria
Pages: 400
Obtained: purchased
Genre:  Contemporary Fiction, Women's Fiction
Rating: 5/5
Bottom Line: A beautiful love story
Grab, Just get it at the library, or Remove from your TBR list? Grab!

Summary: An unforgettable story about true love, real life, and second chances… Rachel Blum and Andy Landis are just eight years old when they meet one night in an ER waiting room. Born with a congenital heart defect, Rachel is a veteran of hospitals, and she’s intrigued by the boy who shows up alone with a broken arm. He tells her his name. She tells him a story. After Andy’s taken back to a doctor and Rachel’s sent back to her bed, they think they’ll never see each other again. Rachel grows up in an affluent Florida suburb, the popular and protected daughter of two doting parents. Andy grows up poor in Philadelphia with a single mom and a rare talent for running. Yet, over the next three decades, Andy and Rachel will meet again and again—linked by chance, history, and the memory of the first time they met, a night that changed the course of both of their lives. A sweeping, warmhearted, and intimate tale, Who Do You Love is an extraordinary novel about the passage of time, the way people change and change each other, and how the measure of a life is who you love. ~amazon.com 


Review: Who Do You Love is another wonderful novel by Jennifer Weiner. Seriously, she never ceases to amaze me. What could resonate with most people than first love. Even though most first loves end up breaking your heart, they do always hold a special place there. Rachel and Andy meet in when they are 8 when Rachel is recovering from heart surgery and Andy is in for a broken arm. Rachel charms him with a retelling of Hansel and Gretel.

As the novel progresses Andy and Rachel find each other again in their early teens and their quick friendship turns to romance. It is evident that they have something special. You could easily dismiss it as first/puppy love but they seem to have an understanding of each other that is hard to find even as an adult.  First love is never easy but even more so with the distance between them but somehow Andy and Rachel fight through it.

It's not that you don't know how it will end, it's that you want to know how they figure it out and how they find each other again. It is pretty much how life would work, which is why this novel is so absorbing.

Honestly who doesn't remember their first love? Sure it probably broke our heart but we do remember it fondly. This is why Who Do You Love sucks you in as a reader. What if our first love turned out to be our lifelong love? You root for Rachel and Andy because they are the couple you know deserve to be together. Sure at times you want to smack them but most of the time you just want them to figure it out.

Jennifer Weiner has a wonderful novel here and it might be her most personal novel yet. 
I will say that there is a lot of sex in the novel and that did surprise me a bit but it isn't gratuitous. If you haven't read Jennifer Weiner, why not? If you need to start somewhere, this is a great novel to start with but you have to read her backlist.


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