Who Do You Love by Jennifer Weiner
Synopsis from the Publisher:
Rachel Blum and Andy Landis are just eight years old when they meet one night in an ER waiting room. Born with a congenial 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.
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 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.
Review: I’ll be honest, I skimmed most of this book. It’s marketed as a romance, and it was the April selection of my book club, so I was excited to read it. But I’m not really sure what to make of Who Do You Love. I thought the writing was pretty good, but the story itself was a drag. It had a promising beginning when Rachel and Andy met, although their encounter was very brief… and then they didn’t meet up again for quite a while.
The chapters alternate between Rachel’s and Andy’s stories, skipping years as they become teenagers and adults. It’s really two completely different stories that Weiner occasionally connects by having Rachel and Andy “fall in love” again… and break up again. And there’s so much ‘day-to-day routine’ that it felt like filler. It got tedious. Neither character had a captivating enough story to keep me invested. Especially since I had no emotional connection to Rachel whatsoever. And, while Andy’s story was a bit more interesting, he eventually started to grate on my nerves as well.
I found it hard to buy that Rachel and Andy had some meant-to-be love – they’re barely together long enough for me to understand and feel it. Eventually, I found myself so bored I was skimming pages just to get to the end… and the last chapter? I have no idea what happened there, but it was the epitome of rushed and… not very sensible.
Again, I enjoyed the writing style, so I think I’ll grab another book by Jennifer Weiner, but I’m hoping the next one is more intriguing than this one was. I love romance in movies, television, or novel form, but a romance should have the two leads together for more than half the book to keep me interested. Sadly, Who Do You Love was not it for me.
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