Fool Hearts

Twenty years is a long time. To have your person, to love your person - but not really have, or love them, you know? Not the way you want to. This is a beautiful, beautiful love story.

When it says friends to lovers, it really is that. Not a few isolated flashbacks of two kids playing together, then one conversation as teens and suddenly we get an awakening. No. Almost 50% of the book is about the friendship. And, dammit, the pining is premium. Years and years of it.

We're let in on so many aspects of their friendship that when one finally decides it's enough and he needs out, you get it. You get why he can't possibly be in that situation anymore and you support it. I just wanted my baby to put some distance between him and the pain.

That being said, this is a book that has many victims. Of circumstances, of each other, of their community. I get that Becca put her happiness first. I get why. But I do think her conversation with him on the day of the wedding was needlessly cruel. I think her getting married, knowing what she did, was sad. For both of them. It can't be easy watching the love of your life suffer heartbreak over the loss of the love of his. And this may sound morbid, but I love how that story arc ended, and I love that Will got the parents he did. But out of all of it, I love that she wasn't villainized, as is the norm in many books.

This is also not a book about cowardice to confess feelings, or miscommunication. This is a book where each time one of them chooses not to talk about their romantic love for each other, it's purely a decision made out of love and utmost respect. At no point do you ever think, “Just say it, damn you, and put us out of our collective misery”. You get why they choose to stay silent, and you love them a little bit more for it.

That being said, I laughed out loud when there was a small window of opportunity and one grabbed it and IMMEDIATELY did what needed to be done. This is a story of the timing never being right, and then in one instant, everything - everything changes.

I love these two so much. There's books where the MCs are in love, and it makes sense, but this is a book where you can actually feel the love they have for each other, and not by their words. Their actions, the consistent putting of the other before themselves, it got me.