After I Do - Review & Giveaway

 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 is the story of a couple caught up in an old game—and searching for a new road to happily ever after.

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Review by Marlene Engel

You know that feeling you get in the pit of your stomach, like a million butterflies are taking flight?  The electricity that shoots through your whole body when your hand brushes his or he glances your way?  Or the way it feels like a fire is lit under your skin when you both embrace or his lips touch yours?  There’s just something so magical and profound about new love.  A feeling like no other and one that you wish would never end.  Then there comes a time in your relationship, after you’ve gotten to know each other, after your first fight and after the newness starts to fade.  A time when everything is no longer exciting and new, when you’re no longer looking through rose colored glasses, when things get static.  That’s the place that Ryan and Lauren are at.  Gone are the days of longing for each other and anticipating their next encounter.  Current are the lonely days and passionless nights.  Not quite ready for a divorce, but both knowing that something needs to change, they reluctantly decide to do a trial separation.  For one year they will go their separate ways and cut off all communication.  They are free to do as they please during this time with the hope that, when they get back together in a year, the love that has gone will have found its way back.  As the old adage goes … absence makes the heart grow fonder.  Or, in this case, will absence make the heart wander?

What do you do when the romance has fizzled and the love is gone?

Join Ryan and Lauren in their journey of love, loss and self-discovery.  The ups and downs of a relationship and the people who are there to help you pick up the pieces.  The author writes a brilliant story that will make you both laugh and cry, but gives you a raw look inside the triumphs and struggles of a relationship and how these two people had to leave each other in hopes of finding themselves.

Put this book at the top of your to-be-read pile.  Such a page turner!  You won’t be able to put this book down until you’ve reached the last page. 

About the author:

Taylor Jenkins Reid is an author and essayist from Acton, Massachusetts. She graduated from Emerson College with a degree in Media Studies. Her first novel, Forever, Interrupted, was named one of the “11 Debuts We Love” by Kirkus Reviews. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband, Alex, and her dog, Rabbit. Her forthcoming novel, After I Do, will be published July 1, 2014.

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