If He Had Been with Me

Just finished it less then an hour ago. This book took me on a ride. Trying not to spoil anything but I’m lost for words and little broken at the moment. I have had ”readers” block for honestly for a year. Trying to pick a book and quitting it less then half way. But this book personally it intrigued, frustrated and made me emotional on so many parts. I just could not quit it and something always drew me back in. I honestly liked that it wasn’t just any other romance book or the story line didin’t go just as in any other book. Or maybe it did but I was too invested to put it down. Give it a chance!

If he had been with me by Laura Nowlin - "Like most of my stories, it will end tragically.3.5/5It's seemingly an odd feeling when you finish a book you could predict the ending of. I will start by saying that I liked the book. It was a beautiful coming-of-age story that puts you in the mindset of high school kids and leads you to reminisce on the friends you once had and the reasons you went your separate way. However, while this book has several good parts that I will mention, it also has some parts that deter me from singing its praises.We'll start with the veggies. I couldn't believe how in denial Autumn was about her feelings for Finny. I mean I get that he's a popular boy now and it's an insecure thing to wonder why an attractive boy is into you but she knew him way before that. She'd known him since birth, long enough to know what his facial expressions and body language meant but she couldn't pick up that he liked her or even that he missed her. Another thing I disliked was the predictability of everything. From the second something was said you could picture the outcome. For instance, when Autumn said she and Sasha fought over Jamie in the beginning, as soon as Sasha broke up with her boyfriend and started hanging out with Jamie alone you knew what was going to happen. Also, as soon as her friend mentioned having unprotected sex you knew she was going to get pregnant which ruined the ending of the cycle continuing when Autumn has unprotected sex.Now for the desert. I loved that the story was told from Autumn's point of view and I believe one of the most realistic feelings this book portrays is the relationship of Autumn's parents. As a teenager, you tend to ignore the adults around you because they don't understand you and you would never want their life and you get that from Autumn. She sees her absent father and knows not to depend on him or expect him to know why she wears tiaras or how she expresses herself. She looks at her mother and doesn't want to become her or exhibit the depressive episodes that she witnesses her mother go through. But in the end, when she loses Finny we see her become her mother and we get a glimpse of it when she goes through seasonal depression.Overall, this book is a good read. After all, I couldn't put it down. It reminded me of what I was like as a teenager in some ways, the group of friends you'd never thought you'd lose until everyone's life changed. I also related to her relationship with her parents. There's so much to hold onto when reading this book. I just wish I didn't see the most shocking parts of the book coming. I wish I could've been surprised when Jamie cheated, her parents divorced, Finny confessed his love, when he died, her suicide attempt, and when she found out she was pregnant. Or maybe I wish he'd been with her.Favorite Quotes:• I've loved him my whole life, and somewhere along the way, that love didn't change but grew. It grew to fill the parts of me that I did not have when I was a child. It grew with every new longing of my body and desire until there was not a piece of me that did not love him. And when I look at him, there is no other feeling in me.• Stay I whisper to him. Stay in the car. Stay in this moment. But of course he never does.• Perhaps he would ask me what books mean to me. I would tell him that it means living another life;• They don’t see that her tension and perfection are the only things holding her together.• I cannot imagine not wanting to live. I cannot imagine not believing that it will be better someday. I cannot imagine that there is nothing left to see, that there is nothing to tie me to Earth. As long as I want to live, then I must be fine.• If he had been with me, everything would have been different.Favorite Characters:Finny, Autumn, Aunt Angelina, Angie, Alex, Jack

Now as a big Layla and Verity fan of Colleen Hoovers, this one is comparable in the shock factor and intensity I felt. I’ll be honest, at first I struggled to get into it, the authors writing style seemed choppy to me and it wasn’t my vibe. I had friends that disagreed with that part, so maybe that’s just me. But I also felt like they were just rushing through time and skipping SO MUCH, and leaving out important details but giving us random somewhat stupid tidbits of information. It didn’t take me too long however to realize that was really actually helpful and made it feel more like what the characters must have felt with the days just passing by. So much ground to cover, so little time to do it. I hit the 80% completion mark and COULD NOT STOP. Everything before then was important, but obsolete to me once I got there. The heat I felt through my entire body, the aches, the rush…all things that only a few other books in my life have ever made me feel. Shat started out as an “eh” book for me has quickly become one of my top recommendations. Such a good read!

*Spoilers*Firstly I can’t remember who raved about this book and recommended it to me but I’d like to give them a piece of my mind. There were so many frustrating things about the sentences and how poorly this book was structured. It’s the worst one by far with this issue. I’ve read to many books to count. The author was all over the place. And no I’m not talking about the time skipping of months going by (I like books like that), which were pretty confusing as one sentence would be early spring and the next paragraph it would be fall. With no spacing or marking to show passing of time like most authors would do. There were very few dates used (more toward the end of the book). Mainly holidays used as markers. The author would go back and forth from present to future to past without any information to what is what. I couldn’t tell what were the main characters thoughts and what were actually memories of her and finny. The actual story I liked though. A few things I think the story could have absolutely done without but that is just personal preference. The whole teenage baby mama situation.. why? It provided nothing. The mention at the end of the book of finny holding the baby? That’s all that side story was meant for. Could have just done without it. I love tragic stories and endings. Of ppl who are meant to be. Who know they love each other, but who don’t communicate and ruin their own chances of happiness. It’s real life and it’s raw. It’s why the show normal people is my favorite. Which this book reminded me a bit of. All the miscommunication the let’s be friends to not being friends to being lovers. It could have been a great story like that one. Until the author said she was pregnant after being hospitalized, after trying to unalive herself after finny died. Why the pregnancy. Why couldn’t she have just died, or better yet lived and turned into the writer she was meant to be. To move on with time and become that writer in that coffee shop.Why must women have to become mothers to somehow have the will to live again? As the story ends with exactly that. She magically now has the will to live now that she has to live to raise a child *eye roll*. Instead of it being tragic or her becoming what she’s meant to be. It ruined the whole story for me. I’m tired of stories ending in pregnancies and being used to make a character have something to live for. The character should have died like finny. It would have been the tragic love story I thought this book was supposed to be. Needless to say I won’t be reading the finny’s perspective book that’s coming out. One last thing I will note, the main character is 100% undiagnosed autistic, it made it worth reading the rest of the book.