Someone Else's Love Story

Single mother Shandi is deeply, lovingly devoted to her brilliant three year old son, so when the handsome William steps between her son and an armed robber, she immediately loves him too. Unfortunately for Shandi, William is still barely recovering from a devastating tragedy in his life and he has some secrets of his own. Their interaction will help both of them find out what they want and what they need as their lives shift around them.

This the third book I’ve read for the SheReads book club and the third one of those books I’ve given five stars, so if you’re looking for some good women’s fiction, I would consider these ladies an expert source of recommendations. Like many books I’ve fallen completely in love with, I have show more very few notes on why I liked it, because I was so deeply absorbed in reading. However, one thing clearly stands out to me as the most amazing part of this book: the characters. The characters were so believable, so unique, so real. Every character had their own history and their own quirks. The author somehow managed to write dialogue and narration that sounded completely natural but which were also examples of extremely beautiful writing.

The plot for me was almost indistinguishable from the characters because it followed directly from how these characters would act. At times I felt as though the author had simply created these characters and set them going, with the plot coming organically from the actions each character would naturally take. William was one of my favorite male characters ever. People with a truly scientific mindset are so infrequently featured as the heros of a book and that paired with his empathy for others made me fall just as in love with him as Shandi. The ending was a complete surprise but not in an unbelievable way and I loved it too. This whole book was a beautiful, hopeful, emotional ride and I can’t recommend it highly enough.

This review first published on Doing Dewey. show less

Ms. Jackson is the queen of Southern fiction. However, Someone Else’s Love Story veers away from the more specifically Southern elements. While the action occurs in the heart of Dixie, Shandi and William are universal characters. Nothing about them or that happens to them is unique to their location. Rather, the story just happens to unfold in Georgia but could just as easily have occurred anywhere else around the country. What happens to them could have happened to a family member, a friend, or a neighbor. This generic quality only serves to make Shandi and William that much more enjoyable and sympathetic because no longer are they strictly a product of their environment.

As for what happens to them, Ms. Jackson finds multiple ways to show more rip out a reader’s heart and stomp it to pieces. Just when one begins to recover and hope for a happy resolution, she rips it out and steps on it again and yet again. While a reader may be an emotional mess because of all the drama, both Shandi and William show a strength and fortitude that is breathtaking in its focus and simplicity. One can only marvel at the way they both move forward out of the depths of tragedy, taking those elements of life they most desperately want and shrugging off the rest. Their individual quirks will make a reader fall in love with them; their determination will make readers bow to their grace under pressure and superior humanness.

To share any more about the novel would be to spoil a simply beautiful story about love and forgiveness, dreams and reality, and the battles that ensue to obtain it all. Ms. Jackson brings her trademark wit to soften some of the harsher edges of her story, while she outdoes herself in the creation of an entire cast of extremely realistic and vibrant characters. All of them are thoroughly enjoyable and feel like long-lost friends rather than words on a page. With her cast in place, Ms. Jackson draws a reader into her world from the stellar opening sentence and does not let go. Long after finishing the novel, readers will still be thinking about Shandi and William and their search for happiness and love.

Someone Else’s Love Story is written perfection. It has all the tragedy, love, and humor as one would expect from Ms. Jackson. What sets this novel apart from her previous ones is her characters. Shandi is so tough and yet so fragile, while William earns his own place in a reader’s heart with his unique approach to life. Beautifully scripted, Ms. Jackson’s newest novel takes readers on an emotional roller coaster and leaves them with that wonderful, much-sought reader’s high. show less

In Someone Else's Love Story by Joshilyn Jackson Shandi Pierce and her three year old son, Natty, are moving to Atlanta where they will live in her dad's condo while Shandi finishes college. Her best friend, Walcott, is helping her move. At a Circle K convenience store right outside the metro area, Shandi and Natty get stuck in the middle of an armed robbery and become hostages. Shandi immediately falls in love with another hostage, a huge blond Thor-like geneticist named William Ashe, when he puts himself between Natty and the robber. William and Shandi end up needing assistance from each other, but it is clear that friends of the two disapprove. Walcott tries to convey his disappointment in Shandi's choices and Shandi is locking horns show more with William's best friend, Paula.

Someone Else's Love Story is narrated by Shandi and William. While Shandi can be very emotional, it is clear, even before it is confirmed, that William is on the spectrum (Asperger's) and remains emotionally detached. Seemingly these two would be a good match, but something is not quite right. William has issues in his past that are unresolved and unknown to Shandi, but the same can be said of her.

Joshilyn Jackson is one of the best southern writers around today, in my opinion, and continues to impress me more and more with each book she writes. (I think I need to start praying for her health so she'll be writing books for a long time.) All of her characters feel like real people. Each of them has a head full of secret thoughts that keeps them apart even while their hearts want to connect to someone or something. In this case a near tragedy draws Shandi to William, but at the same time Shandi needs William to do something only he can do for her.

In Someone Else's Love Story she has created a real sense of time and place and then populated her world with characters that are easy to empathize with. I wanted everything to work out, somehow, for everyone in this book. This isn't a conventional love story, though, even if it seems it might be. Jackson has a few twists and turns for the reader. She sends us through those twists and turns with a good dose of humor and heart, faith and redemption, and family. This is a book that you will stay up too late reading and not regret it for a moment.

Even though I had an advanced reading copy, I simply must share two quotes. (Let's be clear, if I can't stop myself from quoting an ARC, you know the writing is incredible - and it is that good.)

"Anniversaries can open up old wounds, he'd said.... William is not a fan of metaphors; they are so often inaccurate. William, the priest should have said, anniversaries are just like being vivisected."(pg 64)

"It was an ugly thing to witness. Betrayal is always ugly, even on a shaded patio full of little birds." (pg. 205)

Very Highly Recommended

Disclosure: I received an advanced reading copy of this book from HarperCollins for review purposes. show less

While I was reading this book, I started inserting little colored stickies to mark Things I Love About This Book. Pretty soon, the whole book looked like it was lost in a sea of Buddhist prayer flags in Kathmandu.

This book has so many more layers than I can tell you much about without spoiling it. There is a theme that comes from the poem by Robin Behn, "It Is Not Always Possible To Fall in Love in Blackberry Season" which inspired the author to create this story, and the theme from the poem by Emily Dickinson, "'Hope' is the thing with feathers" describing what hope is. [“Hope is the thing with feathers, that perches in the soul, And sings the tune without the words, And never stops - at all...”]

Marvelous allusions to religion echo show more the theme of mixed marriages. And above all, this is a love story that is clever, heartwarming, heartbreaking, heartsoaring, hopeful, funny, and just should not be missed.

It begins with the protagonist, Shandi, being caught, along with her 3-year-old son Natty, in an armed robbery in a convenience store. Taken hostage along with her is William Ashe, whose story is told in alternate chapters. Shandi feels an instant bond with this “big blond wall of a man” who put his own body between the gunman and Natty.

Shandi and William each have BFFs of the opposite sex. Shandi’s is Walcott, and William’s is Paula, and I love how much all of them care about each other and are there for each other. I love the fabulous portrayal of how William speaks. I love his many references to an old vegetable book he had as a child to help him understand emotions. (“The radish is happy.” “The eggplant is sad.”) For example, take his observation when William, in high school, concocts a surprise to impress a girl, and she finds out it was he behind the surprise:

"‘You did this? You?’ She crosses her arms across her chest. Her shoulders fold in toward themselves and her spine hunches. .... William thinks, The squash is disappointed.”

I love the metaphors. Walcott calls Shandi “Easter Candy” when she is acting “like a kid on a bad sugar high.” Shandi admires how good William is at doing nothing, saying, “It was as if he had a thousand toys packed up inside himself...” And there is her wickedly sardonic description of her stepmother Bethany that reads in part: “She was exactly like her house, expensive and elegant, but not at all comfortable.”

Mostly I love how all the characters have defined who they think they love or don’t love because of ideas about who they should love or could love or shouldn’t love, rather than who they in fact love - whether because of genetics, chemistry, or destiny, yet another theme of this story.

Finally, the belief in goodness permeates this story. As William says, even if you have faulty genetics or a bad environment, these only set the range of potential behaviors, and we all can act within that range for good or ill. Some of the characters have trouble believing in God, but they can believe in goodness, and if they would only understand that those two philosophies were not incompatible, all things could be possible.

Evaluation: This is a wonderful book. It will fill you with joy! show less

Do you believe in love at first sight? Falling head over heels before you've ever even met a person? How can you know a person's heart when you've never even met them? In Joshilyn Jackson's newest novel Someone Else's Love Story, young single mother Shandi Pierce is pretty sure she fell in love with William Ashe without even knowing his name. When he chose to step in front of her three year old son to protect him from a guy robbing a convenience store, protecting the child from the possibility of being shot, she fell for him and fell hard. But what does she really know about him and what does she really know about her own heart, for that matter?

Shandi grew up pulled between her Christian mother and her Jewish father. They divorced very show more acrimoniously when she was young and she has spent her entire life trying not to choose one of them over the other, not one parent, not one religion, not one anything. She lives with her mother, who has no use at all for men after her debacle of a marriage. But Shandi is not so sheltered from the male of the species, turning up pregnant her senior year in high school despite still being a virgin, as certified by a doctor. Her baby, Nathan, aka Natty Bumppo, is a boy. Even her long time best friend, Walcott is a boy. And now Shandi's moving out and into a condo in Atlanta offered up by her father and her ice-queen of a stepmother so that Natty, who is a genius, can attend a better preschool than is available to him in the mountains, and so she is closer to school as she works towards her degree. But moving isn't the only big change in her life, it precipitates massive change on all fronts, starting with being held up at the gas station on the way to the condo.

While Shandi sees William as her savior, a beautiful older man willing to sacrifice himself for her child, William sees his actions in an entirely different light. Only partially hearing the news report on the hold-up, Shandi learns that the robbery is the one year anniversary of a terrible accident that shattered William's life. Knowing he is without family, she swoops in to care for him, determined to make him fall in love with her despite the instant antagonism she feels toward his glamorous best friend Paula, the woman who has seen William desperately in love with his wife Bridget and daughter Twyla, and who is intent on telling Shandi that his kindness and caring towards her is not love. But in addition to making him fall in love with her, Shandi also wants his help in locating Natty's father. William Ashe is clearly a brilliant man who also happens to be a geneticist and could in fact solve the mystery of Natty's father. William Ashe is also somewhere on the autism spectrum. And that last fact explains better how he saw what happened in that gas station. Yes, he was protecting Natty, but he also figured that he was staring down a date with destiny in the form of a gun barrel. He was fully prepared and willing to die, not for Shandi or her son, but because it was a choice he wanted to make, an option he would have embraced.

It takes a long time for Shandi to come to understand William and who he really is in truth, not just as the blond god Thor of her imagining. But it takes an equally long time for her to understand herself as well. Why does she want to find Natty's father and punish him? Why is she so determined to find love with William? The miracle here isn't that Shandi has had a virgin birth, it is that she ultimately makes the sacrifice that will lead all of the characters in the novel to the right ending, to the love stories in which each of them belong, that she and sweet, giving William, find a way to make their own miracles.

Jackson has written beautiful, emotionally damaged characters in Shandi and William. Secondary characters Walcott and Paula are amazing too, devoted and protective. The plot here is not the one a reader might expect of a love story but it is so carefully and lovingly written that by the end, it is the only narrative imaginable. Your heart will weep for William and you will sympathize with Shandi and you will spend a lot of time rooting for them to find happiness. The novel beautifully shows the possibilities that bloom even in the ashes of a tragedy. It is a delightful and heartwarming read. show less

This book really made an impression; I kept thinking about it after I had finished it. A simple plot summary (a young single mom falls in love with the man who rescues a group of peole during a store holdup but he's got his own issues to deal with ) doesn't do it justice. It isn't a problem novel and not a goopy love story. It's a book for anyone who's felt like a side character in someone else's story. It's an examination of different kinds of love and complicated relationships. It's an interesting (but not preachy or pitying) look inside the mind of a man with Asperger's (and it doesn't hurt that he's very sexy). It's about life and the things that happen and how we cope. The book surprised me with a twist and made think, but left me show more feeling uplifted. show less

Shandi Pierce and William Ashe meet during an armed robbery at a convenience store. She's a single mom who has convinced herself she's had a virgin birth, he's a scientific savant with a recent past filled with tragedy. She thinks that destiny brought them together, but there's much more to William Ashe's story than meets the eye. This book is hilarious in a totally effortless way, is full of lovable characters, and definitely was not the story I was expecting.