From the BLURB: When Lauren and Ryan’s marriage reaches the breaking point, they come up with an unconventional plan. They decide to take a year off in the hopes of finding a way to fall in love again. One year apart, and only one rule: they cannot contact each other. Aside from that, anything goes. Lauren embarks on a journey of self-discovery, quickly finding that her friends and family have their own ideas about the meaning of marriage. These influences, as well as her own healing process and the challenges of living apart from Ryan, begin to change Lauren’s ideas about monogamy and marriage. She starts to question: When you can have romance without loyalty and commitment without marriage, when love and lust are no longer tied together, what do you value? What are you willing to fight for? This is a love story about what happens when the love fades. It’s about staying in love, seizing love, forsaking love, and committing to love with everything you’ve got. And above all, After I Do ...
I’m very slowly easing back into my reviewer-groove; but life has been pretty hectic lately , and while I am certainly reading more than ever it’s just hard to sit down and collate my thoughts into halfway decent reviews. But I am trying. With that in mind, I wanted to try a slightly different tact in discussing these two books that I’ve read and loved. The first was Kaui Hart Hemmings first foray in YA fiction with ‘Juniors’, which I loved so much that it made it onto my 2015 Favourites list ! The second was a book I received an advance reader copy of via NetGalley, ‘The Smell of Other People's Houses ’ debut YA novel by Bonnie-Sue Hitchcock. I’ve been thinking quite a lot about these two books, and how much I wanted to write reviews for both of them. But then I realized one of the reasons both these books imprinted on me so much was for their unique placement within the American YA realm, and in particular their distinctive settings. So I decided to write a combo-review, praisin...
