Title: How to Love Author: Katie Cotugno
Published: October 1, 2013
Genre(s): Romance: Contemporary
Page Count: 389
Rating:
Summary from Goodreads:Before:
Reena Montero has loved Sawyer LeGrande for as long as she can remember: as natural as breathing, as endless as time. But he's never seemed to notice that Reena even exists until one day, impossibly, he does. Reena and Sawyer fall in messy, complicated love. But then Sawyer disappears from their humid Florida town without a word, leaving a devastated—and pregnant—Reena behind.After:
Almost three years have passed, and there's a new love in Reena's life: her daughter, Hannah. Reena's gotten used to being without Sawyer, and she's finally getting the hang of this strange, unexpected life. But just as swiftly and suddenly as he disappeared, Sawyer turns up again. Reena doesn't want anything to do with him, though she'd be lying if she said Sawyer's being back wasn't stirring something in her. After everything that's happened, can Reena really let herself love Sawyer LeGrande again?
Alloy done good this time. And not to be rude, but it’s kind of a rarity, so allow me to bask in my enjoyment of this packaged book. Okay done. How to Love isn’t your typical romance-type YA book. It’s about second chances and crappy mistakes and growing up. It’s young adult for the more mature audience, perhaps, and Katie Cotugno writes it well. Not perfectly, but well.
The story is narrated alternately from two timeframes: the lead-in to Reena’s teen pregnancy, and then the aftermath. There are a few teen pregnancy books floating around, but I think How to Love is different in that the focus isn’t necessarily the pregnancy so much as other things in Reena’s life. It was sort of a different angle on the “issue” and I thought it was quite well done, all in all. The back-and-forth nature of the chapters wasn’t my favorite, though, because sometimes in the middle of a chapter I’d forget which timeframe I was in, so I’d be confused for a little while. Not a huge issue, though.
I suppose you could say the “focus” of this novel is Reena and how she deals with being her own person in spite of having some really awful things happen. Cotugno leads her readers forward, moving towards a place where Reena can become more confident and self-actualized, how she learns to accept her past mistakes and move on with her life after the fact. That’s all, really, a wonderful theme and I really appreciated the way the book was focusing on Reena’s independence and female strength. I probably would have given this book 5 stars if it hadn’t been for Sawyer and how Reena dealt with him.
Sawyer basically sucks. Back when he and Reena were in high school, he was outright awful, and it was really tough to watch Reena throw her life away for him just because she “loved” him. I’d argue that isn’t very healthy love, if it actually is love at all. And then he comes back, and she basically throws her life away again. Or, rather, she throws away a very, very good boyfriend. Sawyer, meanwhile is kind of a jerk, and in my opinion, all of Reena’s “woman power” was kind of undermined by the fact that she did the thing with Sawyer at all, even though he really isn’t a great guy from where I’m sitting. I honestly can’t even remember a scene where he apologizes for treating her like crap back when they were teenagers, which is a no-no for sure. Truly, the best resolution How to Love could have come to was Reena either ditching Sawyer and being her own woman, or being her own woman and telling Sawyer she’d think about starting a relationship up with him again. That didn’t happen, alas.
It’s just…I don’t know. Sawyer really ruined the book for me, because I didn’t see him as a healthy part of Reena’s life, and I didn’t see their relationship being a longterm thing. Yes, they have a kid together, but I didn’t think Cotugno managed to sell the two of them together as a viable couple. Because we didn’t get that, it really did seem like Reena was throwing her life away, again, for a boy who wasn’t worth her heart.
Questionable love interest aside, I really did enjoy How to Love. It’s a quick, different sort of book with a perspective on teen pregnancy I liked. I think, on the whole, this novel is far above average. On a how-do-I-feel-about-this level: Sawyer GTFO. And that’s all I have to say about that.
