The Opposite of Love

Emily appears to have it all - Yale law graduate in a high-pressure firm, a boyfriend poised to ask her to marry him and a great place in the city then she decides to discover what love is by looking for its opposite which is not hate but emptiness which causes her to look at what she has been using to fill her life. Looking for the next novel from this first-time author. ( )

Emily Haxy is 29, a successful lawyer, lives in NYC, and has a wonderful doctor boyfriend Andrew. She also has a lot of baggage from her past. When the book opens, Emily is about to go into self-destruct mode, which brings about some major life changes. No surprises but good writing and a happy ending. ( )

When Emily has a dream of literally eating her boyfriend, she comes to the conclusion that she must obviously break up with him, preferably before he has a chance to propose. As a young lawyer in a very demanding firm, she feels confident that she has made the right decision. However, as she becomes involved in unethical practices at work and faces the declining health of her favorite grandfather, Emily begins to acknowledge that she is not the person she wants to be. With the support of her friends and some long overdo therapy, Emily begins the painful transformation to become more genuine and honest with herself and the people in her life. This book is laugh-out-loud funny in places and heartbreaking in others. I identified with Emily and enjoyed the way she changed over the course of the novel. A great book about taking risks to love deeper, actualizing your dreams and capturing every moment to fully experience your life. ( )

Although this book is touted as "chick lit" I did not find that to be an accurate description.

It was a touching tale of Emily Haxby, a 29 yr old lawyer who sold her soul to work for a large law firm in NYC and is dealing with many issues. Her mother dies when she was a teenager, she just broke up with her boyfriend, her beloved Grandfather is 89 yrs old and sickly, and she has no communication skills with her father.

I loved the writing in this book, especially the scene in the hotel room with her boss, Carl; and her therapist. I thought she really captured a lost soul trying to find her way very well, and it was totally believable.

I look forward to more by Julie! ( )

New York-based lawyer Emily lives in a cocoon of her own creation, timidly sidestepping her own life as she pours every ounce of her energy into her position at a major law firm. Working obsessively helps drown out the sadness she feels over her complicated relationship with her father and the residual grief she's delayed over her mother's passing fifteen years before, but none of these things can stay buried for long. When her boyfriend Andrew seems ready to propose, Emily panics and breaks things off, retreating even deeper into herself. But that's when the healing really begins.

The Opposite Of Love is a complicated novel to wrap up in a tiny package, so I'm not even going to try. It's Emily's story about growth, fear, insecurity, miscommunication, love, redemption and, most importantly, hope -- the knowledge that the way things have always been isn't the one, true predictor for the way they'll always be. After an inappropriate run-in with her boss at the firm, Emily realizes she's become a mere observer of her own life. And with the help of best friend Jess, her grandfather Jack and his spirited neighbor Ruth, Emily emerges from a deep, numbing depression to see the world with fresh eyes.

There's so much to appreciate and love about Emily -- and Buxbaum's writing. As so much of Emily's general catatonic state revolves around her mother's death, the story could have become very maudlin -- and I wasn't really sure how much of that I was up for. But I shouldn't have worried! Buxbaum more than proved herself to me in her stunning second novel After You, which frequently reduced me to tears. While her stories deal with grief and loss, they're really about the way we continue on in the aftermath of tragedy -- and how we decide to progress past it.

Emily's attempts at reconnecting with Andrew felt like little stabs at my heart; who hasn't waited (and waited...) for an e-mail, phone call or text message that was never going to come? I could feel her desperation to make him understand, but she didn't really understand any of it herself. It's easy to point a finger and call out, as I wanted to, "Classic quarter-life crisis!" But it went so much deeper than that. And I could absolutely relate to Emily and all her attempts at building a life from the ground up, cheering her on as she unsealed the time capsule that stored all her true feelings. Like her father and grandfather, I was proud of her.

I'm not sure which words -- other than awesome -- work best to describe Buxbaum's writing, which seems to effortlessly cut to the real root of every issue. She's insightful. I constantly found myself nodding along to her descriptions of seemingly mundane events, feeling as Emily has felt about waiting and wondering and worrying. While The Opposite Of Love wasn't quite the bucket-of-cold-water-to-the-face that After You was, I still feel like she gets me. And if you grab either of her two outstanding novels, I think you'll feel like she gets you, too. ( )