As with Emily Henry‘s other novels, I breezed through this in what felt like minutes. Her whimsical writing style and witty dialogue are unparalleled. Ironically, I would say this is the least happy of her books I’ve read.  The main characters are fraught with regret, and there’s a fog of melancholy that never really lifts - until the end, of course. It is a romance novel after all. And the ending is satisfying in many ways. Let’s just say I really appreciated the way Henry explored parental relationships.
Since there is a great deal of commentary about this very popular book out there already, I thought I’d put a little cento of sorts together with some of my favorite lines:

“Everything is glitter,

Our love is a place we can always come back to, and it will be waiting, the same as it ever was.

In my chest, an engine turns over.

A place where everything is familiar but nothing belongs to me.

And I know this place, even if I can’t name it.

When I am terrified that all my happiest moments belong to the past, when my body is humming with too much of something, or aching from too little, life stretches out ahead of me like a threat.

even when something beautiful breaks, the making of it still matters.

we write our names in the dark, impermanent but all the brighter and more blazing for it.

If every time I turned the focus back to the thing about me I knew my parents loved, I missed the chance for them to know the rest.”