Proceed With Caution:
This book deals with death and grief.
The Basics:
Love and Other Words is a romance-centric Women's Fiction novel about Macy. It alternates between present day when she's unexpectedly reunited with her first (and only) love and the past when they first met up until they had a falling out. Neither has gotten over the other, but they've also never talked about what happened eleven years ago that forced them apart.
My Thoughts:
I don't normally read Women's Fiction, but Love and Other Words sounded interested, so I decided to give it a try. And I'm so glad that I did! I was immediately hooked into Macy's story even though there was nothing specific that I can pinpoint. I just wanted to know what happened to her and see her get her happy ending. I also just loved the past chapters, because she and Elliot are just too freaking adorable for words. They're both avid readers and spend a ton of time together just reading. Four years of being alone together and just reading. Seriously.
The focus of Love and Other Words is on the relationship between Macy and Elliot, so it does read like a Contemporary Romance, which was good for me. It's just a change of pace, since it doesn't follow the general romantic progression, as we also need to work through Macy's emotional trauma, which is done through her relationship with Elliot. We don't know what happened to separate them for over a decade; it's slowly revealed. I did guess, but that didn't lessen my enjoyment, because there was still a lot of baggage to unpack surrounding it.
Love and Other Words also deals heavily with grief. Macy's mother dies when she's ten and leaves her father a list of "rules" to help him raise a teenage daughter. One of those things was to find her a weekend getaway when she's feeling stressed, which he takes very literally and buys a second home. Next door to Elliot. Macy doesn't talk much about her mother, but over time does open up Elliot about it, since he does ask her and lets her know that he's there if she does want to talk. Then we learn that Macy's father also passed sometime within those eleven years, and she still hasn't dealt with it at all. Her feelings there are completely mingled up with her feelings for Elliot.
I don't want to give anything away, so I'll just say that I really enjoyed Love and Other Words. The teen romance was really sweet and kind of messy. The present day is even more messy because Macy is extremely avoidant of her emotions, which is quite understandable given her history of letting people get close.