In Who Do You Love, Jennifer Weiner (All Fall Down) follows one couple on a 30-year-long journey to a hard-earned happy ending.
Rachel and Andy met in a Miami hospital when they were both eight years old. She was a local girl, comfortably coddled by her Jewish family, recovering from surgery for a congenital heart defect. He was a visitor from Philadelphia, a biracial only child being raised by his single mother, whose vacation was interrupted by a trip to the emergency room with a broken arm. Rachel gave Andy a stuffed bear, and after he got home, Andy wrote Rachel a letter. They never expected to see each other again--but they did, eight years later, in Atlanta, as high-school students working on a service project. They were an on-and-off, long-distance couple until an ugly breakup during their junior year of college. After three years apart, circumstances brought them back together, but the different trajectories of their lives--Andy a track star focused on the Olympics, Rachel a social worker committed to her clients--were just more reasons to question whether they were meant to be each other's lifelong loves, or just first loves.
Romantics might call Rachel and Andy star-crossed lovers, but few of the detours and obstacles to their relationship feel manufactured by capricious fates; they're the recognizable challenges of two people with very different lives trying to create something they can share. Weiner's development of both characters as appealing, distinct individuals who can deny neither their differences nor their enduring bond makes Who Do You Love an engaging, satisfying read. --Florinda Pendley Vasquez, blogger at The 3 R's: Reading, 'Riting, and Randomness