As I said earlier, I think this has been my favorite book by her. I read it in a day and a half. Like the rest of her books, it’s raw and emotional and beautiful and focuses on the relationship of Quinn and Graham – how it started, evolved and began to deteriorate.

What I loved about the book is that the chapters alternate between past and present. In the very first chapter Quinn meets Graham and it’s not a fun, silly little meet cute. Quinn is on her way up to her fiancée’s apartment when she runs into a man pacing outside the door. He scares her because he looks really pissed off, but then she learns he is there because the guy who lives there – who just so happens to be Quinn’s fiancée – is banging the guy’s girlfriend.

Sex sounds are heard, Quinn realizes she is being cheated on, so she and the guy (who happens to be her future husband Graham) sit outside the door and wait for them to finish. They sit outside and eat the Chinese food that the philanderers ordered and has been delivered, and then when the cheaters come out to pick up the food, they give their exes the middle finger before leaving.

The next chapter skips several years into the future. Quinn and Graham are married, but it’s obvious it’s a marriage on the rocks. There’s an unease between them. Lots of words are left unspoken and. We get the idea that there are a lot of hurt feelings and regrets and insecurities festering, and it becomes apparent that no one is talking about them.

Over the course of the rest of the book, we alternate between the happiness that developed as the couple started dating, met each other’s parents, and eventually got married. All of this alternates between the present as the marriage appears to be falling apart, yet neither of them seems to know how to fix it.

This is a great study on how relationships that start off so beautifully can easily fall apart. One thing that really frustrated me was that I felt as though the relationship probably wouldn’t have gone as sour as it did had Quinn opened up to Graham about what she was really feeling. She felt as though she could not give him something that he really wanted – and could never, and she assumed that someone else could and he would be happier with someone else if she let him go – but she didn’t want to let him go. Meanwhile Graham just wanted Quinn’s love. Had she talked about what she was really feeling, I feel like they would have solved the problem earlier on. But then we wouldn’t have gotten this beautiful story – or maybe we would have, just a much shorter version of it.

Despite the frustration with Quinn not coming forward with what was bothering her – I also understood why she didn’t. That’s the thing with Colleen Hoover’s books – they’re real. It’s easy for an outsider to sit and say, “well if you’d just done this, you would have saved yourself a lot of heartache”, but sometimes the thought of doing this is – is just a scary.