Score: 5/5 Bookmarks

Steam Rating: 🍆/5

Love and Other Words by Christina Lauren is a beautiful story that will tug at your heartstrings (and possibly make you sob a little). But don’t worry, it all ends well.

Macy and Elliot become friends when Macy and her dad buy a weekend home after her mother dies, and she finds Elliot (who lives next door) reading in her closet. Their weekends and summers are spent together, but their week-days are spent in what feels like alternate lives.

Years later, after a big blowup that ended their friendship they run into each other. The book takes us through their story, alternating between the past and the present, filling in the blanks at a delicious pace that will have you abandoning the dirty dishes in the sink, and calling in sick to work so you can just. keep. reading.

There’s a little bit of sex in this one, but it’s not overly explicit, so it got one eggplant out of five.

I listened to this one as an audiobook on Libro.fm and loved Erin Mallon’s narration. You can grab the audiobook by clicking the button below, or get the physical book here.

Synopsis:

The story of the heart can never be unwritten.

Macy Sorensen is settling into an ambitious if emotionally tepid routine: work hard as a new pediatrics resident, plan her wedding to an older, financially secure man, keep her head down and heart tucked away.

But when she runs into Elliot Petropoulos—the first and only love of her life—the careful bubble she’s constructed begins to dissolve. Once upon a time, Elliot was Macy’s entire world—growing from her gangly bookish friend into the man who coaxed her heart open again after the loss of her mother...only to break it on the very night he declared his love for her.

Told in alternating timelines between Then and Now, teenage Elliot and Macy grow from friends to much more—spending weekends and lazy summers together in a house outside of San Francisco devouring books, sharing favorite words, and talking through their growing pains and triumphs. As adults, they have become strangers to one another until their chance reunion. Although their memories are obscured by the agony of what happened that night so many years ago, Elliot will come to understand the truth behind Macy’s decade-long silence, and will have to overcome the past and himself to revive her faith in the possibility of an all-consuming love.