Rachel Blum and Andy Landis are eight years old when they meet late 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 all alone with a broken arm. He tells her his name. She tells him a story. After Andy's taken back to the emergency room and Rachel's sent back to her bed, they think they'll never see each other again.
Rachel, the beloved, popular, and protected daughter of two doting parents, grows up wanting for nothing in a fancy Florida suburb. Andy grows up poor in Philadelphia with a single mom and a rare talent that will let him become one of the best runners of his generation.
Over the course of three decades, through high school and college, marriages and divorces, from the pinnacles of victory and the heartbreak of defeat, Andy and Rachel will find each other again and again, until they are finally given a chance to decide whether love can surmount difference and distance and if they've been running toward each other all along.
With honesty, wit, and clear-eyed observations about men and women, love and fate, and the truth about happy endings, Jennifer Weiner delivers two of her most memorable characters, and a love story you'll never forget.
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 meet, although their encounter is very brief… and then they don’t meet up again for quite a while.
The chapters shift between Rachel’s story and Andy’s, skipping years as they grow into teenagers, and then 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 on their own to keep me invested. Especially since I had no emotional connection to Rachel whatsoever. And while Andy’s story was a tad 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 sensical.
Again, I enjoyed the writing style, so I think I’ll grab another book by Jennifer Weiner, but I’m really 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.
Rating: 2/5
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