Love and Other Words

One of my favorite things about reading a book about finding love is that everyone defines the term “love” differently. What one person craves to feel or yearns to show can be entirely different from another. Especially when getting to imagine ourselves in the book, you start to feel a character’s feelings as your own. It teaches you about yourself and introduces concepts that may never have interested you before.

One of my favorite romantic books is Love and Other Words. What immediately attracted me to this book is its multi-perspective timeline: one follows Macy Sorensen in the present, and the other follows her as a young girl. As a pediatric resident engaged to a man named Sean, she feels stable in the life they're living. Sean has a daughter from a previous relationship, and Macy has a sweet connection with her. Everything unexpectedly changes when she runs into Elliot Petropoulos, the boy she fell madly in love with when she was young, but hasn't had contact with for the past 11 years.

Macy lost her mother to cancer when she was only ten years old. Leaving Macy and her father with letters to guide them through different stages of life, her father bought a vacation home to give them a gateway from the city's bustle and ease their minds from all the craziness. That is where Macy first meets Elliot. As Macy’s neighbor, Elliot and she grow from friends into something deeper, as their shared love of reading and deep talks about life pull them closer in a way no one else really does. 

Shortly after they confess their feelings, Macy is left with new information that changes the course of her entire life, which leads to the cutoff of her relationship with Elliot and no explanation as to why. Now, back in the present, she is forced to address the feelings she has tried to avoid for years. Macy eventually confronts and faces the memories of what caused her to disappear from her previous life and how one action caused a spiral of grief.

From strangers to friends, friends to lovers, and strangers again, the book explores themes of learning how to face grief, the past and present, finding your way back to someone, and overall, finding your way back to who you really are.