Jojo Moyes has become my new favorite modern author. No matter what topics she chooses to explore in her novels, she captures me, draws me in, and leaves me breathless when the story is over, filled to the brim with emotion.
First, it happened when I read Me Before You. Then, it happened again when I read The Girl You Left Behind. Today, it happened with The Last Letter from Your Lover. I am still trying to fight back the tears and the emotions this book has stirred up.
I devoured this book in 36 hours. Devoured. I only wish I had been sitting in a beach chair with a warm breeze blowing through my hair and sun warming my skin. That's the only way that reading this book would've gotten any better.
The Last Letter from Your Lover is the story of Jessica, Larry (Laurence), and Anthony (Boot). It is told in three parts and alternates between present day and the 1960's, which I typically like but in this book it confused me for a while. I honestly had no idea that part of the story was being told in flashbacks--but that was my negligence, not the author's. Perhaps I was reading too quickly and missed the details.
The story begins with Jessica in the hospital recovering from a head injury. No details are given about the car accident that resulted in this injury, however. That comes much later in the story. (I will admit that while I was reading this first part of the story, I had flashbacks to What Alice Forgot, and hoped that I was not going to be disappointed by Moyes' story because they both began in such similar ways. This is where the similarity ends, so no worries, my reader friends!) She can not really remember anything about her life (hence my association with What Alice Forgot ) and she relies on friends and family to help her fill in the gaps. One day as she is rearranging things in her bedroom, she finds a letter tucked inside a book. It's vague, signed only "B," but it changes her life. It is at the moment that she realizes, she's got a lover. Only, she has no idea who he is or how their relationship came to be, but she realizes then that she must figure it all out and she must find him.
Once we get enough of Jessica's story to be totally enthralled, and to have had a couple of moments where you shriek out loud by a plot twist or turn (thank goodness I was home alone--my family gives me strange looks when I do this in their presence), we are introduced to Ellie, who is leading a very similar life to Jessica's, only in 2003. Eventually, the two stories become one (as all brilliantly written stories must) and when I closed the book and read the last few words, I was sobbing from this beautifully told love story.
I challenge even the most stoic, love-stories-are-fluff kind of reader to not be touched by this one. There's so much substance to the story I can't imagine relating to it in one way or another. I think I was so overwhelmed by all of it, that the only response I was capable of as I closed the book was to cry. Here's why: the story--in two separate pieces--touches on every woman's (OK--maybe not every woman, but most women) greatest fear: will someone ever love me more than anything else in the world? Will I ever be the most important thing to someone? Jessica deals with this issue and so does Ellie. What makes the story so compelling is that Jessica is dealing with the 1960's version of this dilemma while Ellie faces it in 2003. Some conflicts are timeless, I suppose. I wondered in high school if someone would ever love me that much, and I wondered again in my mid-30's (and yes, I was married at the time). At 40, I was able to conclude that someone DOES love me that much and lucky me, I married him! But all of that fear came flooding back as I read Jessica and Ellie's stories. And worse, the fear of losing this love was what finally pushed me over the edge and started the waterworks. Once you've had that love, how do you move on when suddenly it's gone? Oh. I just can't even think about it sometimes. It's a paralyzing thought.
The Last Letter from Your Lover, as with the two previous Moyes books, has satiated me to the point that I do not wish to pick up another book for a few days. I want to keep this one in my heart for a bit longer.
I might have just stumbled upon 2014's #1 read.
Happy reading everyone!
:) Dodie
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