The Love of Her Life Book Review

The Love of Her Life by Harriet Evans

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Blurb:

In London, Kate Miller had an enviable life: an exciting job at a fashion magazine, an engagement and a wedding to plan. Then it all fell apart - spectacularly, painfully, and forever. That was three years ago...and she fled to New York City to live with her mother and stepfather.

Now Kate is a true New Yorker, in love with the pace and rhythm of Manhattan. But deep down, she knows her life is in a holding pattern, that there is something - someone - more to love. But when her father becomes ill, Kate realizes it's time to return and face the friends and the memories she left behind. What really happened before Kate left London? Can she pick up the pieces and allow herself to love life again?

Review by Brittany:

I love this book.

The book started a bit slow, with Kate making the transition to going back to London. This part of the book was a bit weird because it's before all of the truth comes out, so the reader is only getting bits and pieces and no real information about why Kate left London in the first place.

As the author fills in the gaps and the history of all of these people is revealed, it's just sad. There is so much misery, so much heartbreak, and so many secrets that it's sad to think that this whole group of people were friends.

One character that I was surprised to like was Francesca. In the beginning, she seemed a bit rough around the edges, like she was a bit of a troublemaker and I wasn't sure if I liked her much. By the end of the book, I realized that Francesca just has her own way of going about things, but that she actually has a pretty big heart. Charly was a character who rubbed me the wrong way from the beginning. When she and Kate first meet, she is catty, a gossip, and she gets around. She's a bit of a bad influence on Kate, but they still become best friends.

This book explored how tragedy and secrets can affect the relationship between girlfriends, and I really enjoyed reading about these relationships change. There were moments in the book where I laughed out loud because of the banter that the author included between the female characters.

Overall, the book is fairly predictable. The reader can easily tell what's going to happen, if not exactly how it will get there. I don't mind reading books that are predictable overall if I can get a little bit of a surprise, and this book fulfilled that. It was lovely read, sometimes frustrating and sometimes sad, but always keeping me turning pages.

Notable quotes:

It's strange, the things that are stored in your brain but that you haven't thought about for years. 

Once again, she wasn't sure what to do, how to behave.

It had been one of those event evenings that mark the beginning of a new time in one's life and thus the end of another, she realized now. 

Now that she was, she supposed, a grown-up, Kate had never really thought about what she wanted, in reality, from her life.

She was used to everything being easy for other people; going to parties, chatting to people, kissing boys, falling in love. Kate had never found it easy. 

She saw him every day, spent every night with him, he was her world, totally, and panic suddenly gripped her as she thought about making her way in the world without him. 

She just hadn't realized how easy it would be to walk away from it. To be forgotten, melt into the background.

"We're all the same, you know, it's just different versions of being the same."

Because being Charly was a great thing, of course it was, it had to be, but sometimes it must be pretty damn miserable.

Every girl spends her whole life wondering what her proposal will be like and when it comes...it doesn't feel like a proposal, like the most amazing moment of your life. It just feels like...well, two people having a bit of a casual chat.

She spent all day working on the illusion that women could have it all, when the reality was much more complicated.

As if the house of cards she - and Sean, and all her friends around her - had erected was just that: card, flimsy, impermanent.

She felt as if she were becoming invisible, as if parts of her life were becoming invisible.

The idea that people went to work, that she had her office and a desk and a view over the river, that she had a job that she went to, a life before all of this? It was mad, unbelievable, like everything else.

"All I'm saying is, you don't hate someone that much without still feeling something for them."

It hurts to love people because you expose yourself to them, and they can hurt you, so much.