Amazing book!
I was thoroughly engaged throughout this book and I didn't want to put it down! The author captured my attention from the get go! Five stars from me :)

Absolutely amazing book, loved every page every word every character it’s the best debut this year! Can’t wait to give it to everybody

A contemporary tale of two best friends over the years, from university years to parenthood.

Sounds conventional but Ari and Mar are anything but. Ari escapes New York to Leeds University and meets Mae, a proud lesbian. They soon become inseparable, though Mae struggles when Ari admits he is pansexual, instead of gay as she assumed. Their lives evolve over a decade, with hidden loves, toxic partners, health struggles and more, This Love has been described as One Day for a new generation.

I’m not sure I would go that far, but these characters will stay with me for a while.

I will admit that I found the first 150 pages to be a slow, meandering trek, like wading through molasses. I liked the characters but I wasn’t gripped enough by their lives to pick up the book. Suddenly, I reach the halfway point and devoured the rest in a day.

This may be down to my own perspective; at 34 I am closer to their ages at the later stages of the novel and can relate more to their struggles, to their desires for a family.

Mae and Ari are multifaceted characters with nuance, depth and complicated histories. Despite their differences they are each others biggest supporters in their own way, and the way Jeffs has crafted their individual identities around the other is skilful.

The narraitve jumps around from the past, to the present and into the near future, but is easy to understand and doesn’t muddy the story at all.

I do feel like the end was rather abrupt, and would have perhaps liked to read one more time jump before the finale. When I first finished this, I felt a little flat, wondering ‘is that it?’. After a little reflection I think it is a clever novel that may appeal to different aged audiences, or in fact the same person over a decade of their own life.

I did see some hype on X/Twitter for this novel which I think raised my expectations slightly too high, but This Love is a beautiful look at the strength and beauty in platonic love.

There is nothing inherently wrong with this book, or the way it is written. There are some great moments, neatly packaged in words that will bring a sense of enlightenment, understanding, or kinship to many of those who will read this book in the future. I just struggled to connect with the two main characters, who I just could not get to jump off the page in the way I would have liked them to.

If you are a fan of books that span many years of life of the main character(s), or are a fan of LGBTQIA+ literature in general, this might be the book for you, especially as I seem to be by far the minority, and the characters seem to resonate with other reviewers much more than with me.

A beautiful tale of friendship and found family. Mae and Ari were great characters and their voices rang true and strong as they narrated their story.

Engaging, funny and poignant - this was a great read.

This Love has had excellent advance views on Twitter and so I was very excited to read it.
It’s about the ten year friendship between Mae and Ari who meet at Leeds University after Ari leaves New York following a scandal with his professor.
I so wanted to love this novel but I found it difficult to connect with the writing style which didn’t draw me in and I felt that the characters lacked depth. The last section of the novel was more compelling and moving although I did feel that the author tried to fit too much in towards the end.
Many thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the opportunity to read and review this digital ARC.

Mae and Ari are portrayed with such depth and authenticity, making them truly lovable and relatable characters. The depiction of university life felt remarkably true to life, capturing its complexities and challenges with realism.

Reading about the bond of the chosen family during the holiday season was especially heartwarming. The story beautifully explores themes of friendship, love, and acceptance, highlighting the importance of finding belonging and support in the people we choose to surround ourselves with.

Overall, it was a delightful and ultimately heartwarming tale that left a lasting impression.

The E-Book could be improved and more user-friendly, such as links to the chapters, no significant gaps between words and a cover for the book would be better. It is very document-like instead of a book. A star has been deducted because of this.

This is a first for me by the author and one I enjoyed and I would read more of their work. The book cover is eye-catching and appealing and would spark my interest if in a bookshop. Thank you to the author, publisher and Netgalley for this ARC.

There were some things in this book that I really loved, not least the emphasis on the love between a queer platonic couple, and how this relationship remained as their lives changed. The various types of family, and how you can find and embrace your new without dismissing your/the 'old' forms, was one of the key things for me. I liked how Mae and Ari were very three dimensionally flawed, although Mae was sometimes harder to respond to, usually when her fixed opinions had to adjust to others.

However I often found that I was more intrigued by many of the side characters, I think this is the potential pitfall of this kind of book whrre therd are a lot of love interests, family, work colleagues etc, is that sometimes I just end up wishing I was following one of the other minor characters instead (often Alice!), or wondering what happened to X. And then some minor characters were really mire important than their space or attention in the narrative. Like Kate, who was very short changed in the story. She was basically a cipher and I wanted to know about her but she was just a blank! I can't care about someone if you don't give me anything.

The biggest issue I had though was the timing and pacing, although this is kind of linked to the side characters issue too. Basically the last 10-15% of the book just rammed at least 50% of a books worth into a couple of chapters. There were huge major interesting things happening that got a sentence at most and I was just, huh? It felt like there was a word limit suddenly imposed so the author just decided to list off everything rather than explore it. And after there were so many chapters covering relatively little early on, it just felt unbalanced.

Better editing could have made this a lot better, but it did have some very enjoyable bits too.

*Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the free ARC*

This book came up in my Twitter (X) feed a while ago, I think when Laura Pearson shared a review of an advance copy, and I’ve been looking forward to reading it ever since, Described as ‘A queer One Day for a new generation’ by the publisher, I had high expectations as I adored One Day. This book differs in that the two main protagonists are soulmates, but not in a romantic sense. Beautifully written, with realistic, flawed characters, this book covers love and found family in various forms, Thanks Netgalley and the publisher for such an enjoyable read.

I almost didn’t finish this book. I remember an author saying ‘if you get to page 57 and you’re not hooked, ditch it’
I am SO pleased I didn’t ditch it. This is going to be one of my favourite- if not favourite book of 2024.
The main characters, the way the story progresses, I laughed and I cried, an absolute perfect story- thanks so much Lotte

A truly gorgeous read, I loved how Mae and Ari’s friendship was explored – through the different time periods (university, different cities, relationships etc.) as well as through their sexuality and how this fit in to their lives. How beautiful to see representation of families being shown in different ways – building your own family, as well as found family and blood family. Incredible.
Thank you to the publisher and NetGalley for the chance to read this ARC.

Love love love this book = I couldn't put it down once I started reading it, the story is so touching and has so many possibilities loaded into it.

Mae and Ari meet while they are at university, make a promise and form a bond that is set to last them a lifetime. The time at university is so nostalgic, the hurt and the past experiences seem very real and lived, and as time goes on the chances and mischances that happen weave a wonderful deep story of a kinds of love and friendships.

All the characters seem to be lightly but meaningfully sketched, their interactions ring true and the theme of building a family of your own, in your own time and way, is strong throughout, as are all the types of love that are on display, front, centre and also in the background.

The book made my heart ache and my soul sing - what a marvellous story, read it and enjoy.

I loved this very human story of two queer young people, Ari and Mae, who meet at university and become platonic soulmates. We see their friendship and love explored over a decade of exploring love, work and other life events. It’s not a cosy story. It feels very real, in the way they fall out, the way they manage when the other finds a romantic partner and in the challenges they face in trying to consider what family means.
Ari and Mae felt very real to me, and I was rooting for them throughout the book. Other characters are well-drawn too. There’s a tine-skip which I am a bit uncertain of. I think the story could have developed in a linear fashion and had the same impact, but that’s a minor niggle in a book which is a lovely, very real feeling, read.

I really loved this book, and find the comparisons to One Day irritatingly basic. Please don't let it put you off.

As someone who has been lucky enough to have a multi-decade, fiercely committed queer platonic friendship that started at university, this story resonated deeply with me. I am the flamboyant Ari to a wonderfully reliable Mae. I absolutely could have imagined us making promises to make a family together if that's what we had wanted from our lives.

Thank you to the author for capturing this kind of queer relationship on the page. It's rare that we get to see our multidimensional sense of family in the mainstream.

This love starts with an intriguing beginning, fully queer, following the main characters Ari and Mae from their uni days to 10 years later, having different partners, drifting in and out. The writing is easy to read, though I would have liked it more if it's written more beautifully and a 100 pages shorter, but I do love the poems that the characters wrote.

I love the storyline, though it's slightly unrealistically optimistic. Also the chapters about the future were a bit confusing, was not sure whether it's only in their imagination or real. The second half of the book focus a lot on queer parenting, it does provide readers a point of view and information on the topic as it's rare to see in fiction books in my opinion. I do wish the relationship between the characters were written more in-depth, however, it's a nice queer love story that I enjoyed reading.

Thank you Netgalley for the advanced e-copy

I was super excited for this book! There is just so much hype around it!
But I was just left a bit flat. This book was just so 'meh'
I found Lotte Jeffs writing style to be a bit too whimsical for me. It was too descriptive, which meant that it slowed down the plot and the overall pace of the book. But on the other hand, Jeffs characters felt very real and well rounded.

I wasn't overly keen on this book, and think it has definitely been overhyped! The characters were pretty fascinating, but I just found the plot to be too slow in pace to keep me interested.

I’m filing this one under “I’m likely the problem, not the book.” Honestly, I felt too old to be reading this - I think my teenage niece would adore it as much as she does Sally Rooney - but for this ageing millennial it didn’t work.

✰ 2.75 stars ✰

“Love, real love, can feel like it comes from the darkest cavern of us. It pulls us below the surface and it lives in that deep, secret place.”

Aristotle is quoted to have said, 'A friend is a second self, so that our consciousness of a friend's existence...makes us more fully conscious of our own existence.' And nothing could have been truer than This Love, a story that follows the lives of two best friends, Mae and Ari as they navigate decades of heady college days, complicated relationships, messy arguments, life-altering decisions, tortured confessions and familial heartbreaks, but always with the beautiful promise that throughout the many challenges, one thing that forever keep them connected is the indomitable perseverance of their friendship. 🫂

“OK, fine, there’s this other side of me that thinks finding a woman to love, having a house with a garden, a kid or two, a whippet called Willow, that’s the real dream. Tragically hetero, I know.’

‘Oh, but she can have it all!’ Ari moved his hands like a dancer. ‘And you will. I can tell. You don’t need to be ashamed about wanting those things.

They don’t belong to straight people; we are entitled to that kind of happiness too.”

Since their first meeting during their college years in 2014, Mae and Ari felt like kindred spirits - they balanced each other's passion and drives in a most fascinating way that made life shine even brighter than when they were apart. 'Being a girl who passed as a boy, and he a boy who could pass as a girl, meant power and freedom to her.' And while that can be a beautiful thing, it can also be a crippling one, when Mae is attracted to girls and Ari does not have any specific preferences. 🥺 With that defining point in their relationship, it slowly sets the groundwork of how it's something that not only at times breaks them apart, but what also keeps them together. And as the years go by, as we learn more about either of them and share in their experiences, we get to see how it's something that plays such a pivotal part for how they treat one another.

I really enjoyed the college years - full of youthful spirit, the vibrant tenacity and the sparkle of not knowing what future awaited them. There is a certain celebration to being queer that resonates so strongly in their story - how they embrace it and allow it to guide them in the decisions they make. 'But can I just enjoy who we are together, without the shadow? Be us for a little while longer?’ 🥹 As we enter their adult years, we get to see how either of them are trying to find their place in the world - to figure out what is the right track for them and where exactly do they fit into it and how they fit into each other's lives. Life has a way of even testing the tightest and best of friendships; it's at those moments, when Mae and Ari truly see how much they mean to each other, what is the worth of their friendship. The heart-breaking and emotional revelations that kept being thrown their way were hard for me to bear and I can only imagine how much it must have hurt either of them. ❤️‍🩹❤️‍🩹

The narrative makes constant shifts in time jumps that oftentimes makes it confusing and hard to keep track of what exactly is happening. I understand that it is important to touch upon the people they were before they met, but I had a hard time discerning the importance of future moments that weren't even clearly depicted. 🙍🏻‍♀️ In an effort to maintain an air of mystery, I suppose, of what exact future awaited them. So, it did keep my interest, for a while. But, then at times the pacing started to drag and I would lose interest and wonder why it is necessary to show this moment or why was it such an insistent need to prolong it. 'That’s what’s so hard to accept – the if only.' But, I suppose, that is the love of life that we experience over the years.

“What we have is different and it’s special, and whoever either of us falls for in life, we won’t ever have with them what you and I have with each other.”

Ari was a difficult character for me - it's not that I didn't like him. It's that I didn't like why the author chose to give him such a tragic, if not, rather stereotypical portrayal. I respect that the author did dedicate it to people who were real-life Ari's so it would be a disservice for me to not acknowledge his struggles. I just didn't like it that he was presented with so many! 😫 So many obstacles, so many traumatic experiences, so much that made him question himself as a queer person and have to shame himself into being something different, simply to survive in a toxic and abusive relationship. It was frustrating and heart-breaking to see how much he was afflicted with and I didn't quite empathize with his growth as a character. It was bad enough that there were some lingering troubles rising up from Mae, I don't think it was so very fair that he never seemed to quite catch a break. And when he did, he would then be backed into another corner. 😥

Mae, however, truly became someone to be reckoned with. Overcoming her insecurities of her youth, she entered adulthood with ambition and a desire to make her presence felt, but never enough to commit to someone on an intimate level - till she did. Though, on a personal note, she endured a lot of heartbreak, her path to success was paved with some tough choices that forced her to examine herself not only as a woman, but as a woman in a competitive business. 🙋🏻‍♀️ She faced some difficult hurdles, and I appreciated how it was depicted, and how it continued to tie into Ari's life. For Ari was always there - he would always be there, and it is some of her feelings for him that made me like her slightly less sadly.

I do know that in MF friendships, especially one as close as there, it's always hard realizing that they may fall in love with someone else - that they can only ever be platonic. There was never not a clear indication of how strongly they felt for each other - they saw each other in a light, no one else ever would come close to. 🥺 But, the way she expressed her jealousy, how intent she was of clinging to him, and not really allowing him to spread his wings - really left a bad taste in my mouth. 'She had wanted to hold onto his heart. How wrong she’d been. There was space, so much space for this love.' As valid and natural as her honest feelings were, her blatant jealousy of his affections for anyone else wasn't something that resonated well with me. It made me dislike her for the majority of the book, and I didn't quite believe that she ever redeemed herself, in my eyes. 😒

“We’re soulmates, I suppose, that’s always felt the nearest to it.”

The story begins with an excerpt from Friedrich Nietzsche's The Gay Science - '...a kind of continuation of love in which this possessive craving of two people for each other gives way to a new desire and lust for possession – a shared higher thirst for an ideal above them. But who knows such love? Who has experienced it? Its right name is friendship.' Taking that into account, then Lotte Jeffs succeeded in depicting a deeply heartfelt exploration of it. 👍🏻 For while I was frustrated and angered at times by their choices and how their lives converged and eventually ended, it was not without their shared beauty and passion of what it means to love. To find it with someone that lets them create an unbreakable bond that binds them all together, as one. 💌

The characters felt very believable to me - their passions and emotions - expressive. The conflicts that arose were not without their grievances and faults and watching them navigate through them was at times heart-breaking, if not daunting, as well. But, Ari and Mae also experienced the joys of living, too; and even if it was not with each other - a failed chance at shot of what they hoped they could have been - it does not seem fair to dismiss and not appreciate what has been. 😔 That is the journey of life, for some, after all. Even if it's not something you set up to have, it doesn't mean that it wasn't worth the fight or the risk it took to get there. To have the chance to share in something that was entirely theirs - 'they are something new; a creature with a shared heartbeat and many limbs. A family.' 🫶🏻🫶🏻

*Thank you to NetGalley for an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

I am absolutely obsessed with this love story and how it centres platonic love. There isn’t enough books centred around the importance of this and it was so refreshing to read. As a northern english girl this had me from the start, but the beauty around how even with time apart found family is just as special as ever.

I loved this book! (spoilers further down in this review)

Ari and Mae meet at the University of Leeds and quickly become best friends and This Love follows them as they grow up into adulthood. It explores family and friendship and love (and platonic love is as important, if not more important than the romance in this book) in a really refreshing and authentic way.

All of the characters were brilliantly well rounded and enjoyable to read about. Even Oliver, as the "bad guy" of the story was not just some caricature of "bad" or deliberately hurtful.

I think my main complaint about this novel is potentially just pacing - looking back, there were a few sections that I don't think added much to the story and others that I'd have liked to have explored more. There's a lot of focus on how they're starting a family and them dealing with fertility issues but then little focus on the way that eventually, they do build as a family and I've have loved to see more of (spoilers) how V and Mae found the fostering / adoption process and how the boys adapted to their new lives with them as it ended up feeling a bit glossed over.

Anyway, I really enjoyed it and definitely recommend it.