A lot can be said about this book's setting, which is catching up with two people every July 15th for twenty years. Smart, isn't it? I won't go around writing about that because I'm not smart enough to do so. I, however, can just go ahead and say that I loved the characters because I did. I do.
I love Dexter Mayhew despite his constant struggle to keep the people he loves in his life. The strain of doing so wears him, and the people around him, thin. He is flawed, completely flawed, but it is in this complexity that I find him charming and human. I love Emma Morley because while she isn't up-front pretty, she is intelligent and principled. I love how she struggled to find her footing at first but eventually became an accomplished woman. I love how she's so reflective and how she feels so strongly for many things that it's easy to misread her as angry and self-satisfied. I love her because she reminds me of myself, of my fears, of my worries, of the future I frequently think of (even if I should be focused on the rut I am currently in, a.k.a my ugly present). At 20, one of my biggest fears is waking up twenty years later as the person I hoped I would not be. Let me write the quote that I like the most:
"She sometimes wondered what her twenty-two-year-old self would think of today's Emma Mayhew. Would she consider her self-centered? Compromised? A bourgeois sell-out, with her appetite for home ownership and foreign travel, clothes from Paris and expensive haircuts? Would she find her conventional, with her new surname and hopes for a family life? Maybe, but then the twenty-two-year-old Emma Morley wasn't such a paragon either: pretentious, petulant, lazy, speechifying, judgemental, self-pitying, self-righteous, self-important, all the selfs except self-confident, the quality that she had always needed the most."
I can write many things about Emma Morley but I won't do that. I would like for others to discover Em and Dex in their own way. The last thing I can say about this book (without spoiling it, I've been told the way I write about my books kind of ruin things for other people) is that I loved the characters' chemistry, the almost tangible connection they share with each other and with the reader. I love Suki Meadows, Tilly Killick, Alison Mayhew and even cold, collected, calculated Sylvie. Most of all, I loved Em and Dex and how right they were for each other, loving and hating one another at the same time. I love their partnership. While reading the book, I felt like I was watching two of my old friends' lives unravel before me. I knew, just like everybody else, that they were bound to get together somehow, if not a little bit late. I love Em and Dex, Dex and Em. I love the people that they were and the people they've become. I loved every July 15th, the twenty years in their life that I was able to see.
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PS: So much thanks to A for lending me this book. It was a good read. :)
