Review: Who Do You Love by Jennifer Weiner

Synopsis:

An unforgettable story about true love, real life, and second chances…

Rachel Blum and Andy Landis are just eight years old when they meet 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 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.

Rachel grows up in an affluent Florida suburb, the popular and protected daughter of two doting parents. Andy grows up poor in Philadelphia with a single mom and a rare talent for running.

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 the course of 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.


My Review:

Everyone has heard the saying “you never forget your first love”.  Life often takes us down different roads and first loves rarely work out.   But what if you were given a second chance?  

In this book we meet Rachel Blum and Andy Landis, total opposites, who meet as children and then part ways never expecting to see each other again.  But, they do meet again as teenagers, during a youth group trip where they helped build houses for low income families.  That is when they fell in love.  Living in different states made it hard to see each other, so they stayed in touch writing letters and talking on the phone until they could see each other again.  During college, Andy would visit Rachel when he had free time.  Then one day everything fell apart and they stopped talking. 

The rest of the book focuses on their lives as individuals.  Along the way there is new love, children, careers and a big mistake that is made.  And just when they both think they have hit their lowest point, there is hope on the horizon. 

I enjoyed Rachel and Andy’s story and how you got an in depth look into their lives and how it created their personalities.  Andy grew up with a single mother who struggled to make ends meet.  Rachel was a rich girl who had pretty much anything she wanted.  They both had different goals in life.  They both had different religious beliefs.  Andy got in fights and in trouble a lot and Rachel was the good girl.  But when they were together, none of that mattered.  They brought out the best in each other.  I liked everything about the story.  I just think the ending could have had a little more to it.  I wasn’t ready to part with Rachel and Andy yet.  I felt a few more pages could have wrapped up their story better.