Love Anthony was not the book I expected. I generally don’t refresh my memory about a book by reading the dust jacket or back cover blurb right before I read. So, of course, I didn’t do that with this book, even though it’s been on my reading list for years. This book is about two women, both living in Nantucket. Beth, a mother of three teenage daughters, is reeling from the discovery of her husband’s infidelity. Olivia has escaped to the island to grieve the death of her autistic son Anthony and the fallout of her marriage. Both women are on personal journeys that end up intersecting in the most surprising and miraculous ways. It’s my own fault that I was not prepared or expecting this story.

The character Beth is a writer and I generally don’t like books where there is fiction within fiction. In this case, Beth is writing a story and there are excerpts of her writing as chapters in Love Anthony. That’s a trope that is not for me.

However, the ending of this book was beautiful. I had tears in my eyes while reading the last few pages. There is a heartfelt message behind this story and it does an excellent job of bringing awareness and understanding about childhood autism to the reader. I loved the beach setting and I could picture the scenes so perfectly. Genova’s writing and her descriptive characters are what boosted my rating of this book so high when it was a storyline that I wasn’t so particularly fond of.