The Blonde Diaries

Chick Lit Review: Love the One You Are With (Part 2)

Well I woke up early Sunday morning and had a few minutes to spare before I needed to get ready for my trip to the zoo with Mike & Beth at 11am. I will totally blame Beth for the 11am start time and our subsequent dying of heat and sweating like a pig at the zoo from 11:30-2pm since she didn’t want to get up any earlier. So in the few minutes, well hour, I had before it was time to go I finished up Love the One You Are With by Emily Giffin. You might remember from Part 1 last week that I was not totally feeling this book. I decided to keep reading it after skimming reviews on Amazon.com and finding that it did end up having a happy ending and I felt if I had made it 3/4 of the way thru I might as well finish the darn book.

So my final thoughts are pretty much the same as my previous thoughts. Even at the end of the book I couldn’t like the characters or the story. I just couldn’t relate. The book is basically about Ellen Dempsey, newly wed, who is happy in her life with her husband Andy until she runs into her first love Leo on the streets of New York. Ellen then begins to wonder what her life would have been like had she and Leo never broken up which then led to her wondering why did they break up and why she never heard from Leo again after their small “breakup” fight. So throughout the book you follow Ellen’s thoughts and wonders on what could have been/would have been had she fought for Leo vs. did she settle when she married Andy. At the end of the book we finally see Ellen get the closure she needed from the original relationship with Leo as well as making changes in her life so that she is not always settling because of someone else’s wants.

Maybe a second read will shed a different light on the book but I’m just not sure. I have always been the rational type that knows when something is broke you leave and forget about it never questioning it later. Probably if you have a romantic gene in your body or have lived through this same type of situation you will really enjoy this book.

available from Amazon.com in hardback for $15. I’d probably check out from the library or buy gently used.