Review: After I Do by Taylor Jenkins Reid
Titlte: After I Do
Author: Taylor Jenkins Reid
Series: Standalone
Publication: July 1st, 2014
Summary: From the author of Forever, Interrupted—hailed by Sarah Jio as "moving, gorgeous, and at times heart-wrenching"—comes a breathtaking new novel about modern marriage, the depth of family ties, and the year that one remarkable heroine spends exploring both.When Lauren and Ryan’s marriage reaches the breaking point, they come up with an unconventional plan. They decide to take a year off in the hopes of finding a way to fall in love again. One year apart, and only one rule: they cannot contact each other. Aside from that, anything goes.Lauren embarks on a journey of self-discovery, quickly finding that her friends and family have their own ideas about the meaning of marriage. These influences, as well as her own healing process and the challenges of living apart from Ryan, begin to change Lauren’s ideas about monogamy and marriage. She starts to question: When you can have romance without loyalty and commitment without marriage, when love and lust are no longer tied together, what do you value? What are you willing to fight for?This is a love story about what happens when the love fades. It’s about staying in love, seizing love, forsaking love, and committing to love with everything you’ve got. And above all, After I Do is the story of a couple caught up in an old game—and searching for a new road to happily ever after.
My eyes are still puffy from reading this, so don't mind any grammar mistakes. Oh boy, oh boy, oh boy. What a wonderful book I have read here. I don't usually finish books in two days, and I rarely give out 5/5 ratings, and I rarely like contemporary, but this book will be loved by me forever. If the main characters don't love each other anymore, I swear I will.
This book just assembles together how life works. People are complicated. We don't make it easy to understand each other. We are puzzle pieces and all the pieces have been set on fire, have melted, and no longer fit each other. That is how we are. After I Do tells me the truth about people that we all need to hear. It is a falling-out-of-love story and overcoming-my-last-love story.
The main character, Lauren, is too real to me. She is smart but dumb, funny but serious, nice but mean, tolerable but annoying. Yeah, at some moments, I want to reach inside the book and shake her, but then I remember she's technically not real, and that's the great thing about it! She's real, but not really real. I hope I make sense.
Ryan--Lauren's husband--didn't appear too much in the book, but there's plenty of opportunity for readers to see and understand the past and present relationship between Lauren and him.
The writing was very simple, but it got the job done. It made me outrageously weep, smile, laugh, et cetera. I don't want to give too much away, but if you want to read about some real people and real lives, read this one.
