By Samhita Holla and Haley Kim
As sad as it is to say, we, once passionate reading fanatics, have been stuck in an endless loop of un-reading. While drowning in an endless stack of homework, SAT Prep textbooks, and CEJs, we thought the perfect way to get our minds off school and back to our prime reading days was to take a lovely trip to our favorite place in the world—The Recycle Bookstore.
After an arduous journey of shuffling through row after row of books, and feeling quite hopeless since we were now at our last resort, the romance section, our gaze suddenly landed on the cutest book we’d ever seen. The store just so happened to be down to its last two copies—it was destined to be our savior.
Love & Other Words is a second-chance romance novel about childhood sweethearts who reconnect as adults after an eleven-year silence. Since it’s a bestselling novel and also highly recommended to us by our fellow reader Lucky Felder, we knew this book would have to get us out of our slump. In fact, maybe a romance is exactly what we need after months of reading AP textbooks. While we’ve just started reading the novel, we can definitely attest to the greatness of this book. It has everything we could have ever hoped for: a second-chance romance trope, dual timelines, and descriptive writing! With our copies in hand, we now have the perfect excuse to stay up late at night without blue light rays burning our corneas.
While we’re not really reading together, given that we agreed to start at the same time and there is clearly a gap in reading pace (Samhita Holla is on page 250 and Haley Kim is on page 70…), we’re so excited to talk about the characters, plot, and ending! It’s safe to say that we are slowly getting back to our prime reading days together.