Skip to main content
PBS logo
 
 

Book Review of Love the One You're With

Love the One You're With
reviewed on + 43 more book reviews


I don't know what it is about Giffin's writing, but her books are highly addictive, even though, on the surface, they are about the common, almost boring, details of "real life." She also has an amazing way of developing a character who is thinking and doing extremely controversial and unsympathetic things - at least by society's standards - and making their dilemma wholey understandable and relateable.

In this book, we meet Ellen Dempsey Graham who struggles through a decision between the man she married and the love of her life who once broke her heart. Ellen's journey touches on the growth process of every woman in her 20's who, while trying to get to know herself, develop her career, establish a foundation of self-esteem, also dates, and sometimes falls in love with, men who change her course of self-discovery, with mixed results.

Who among us doesn't have at least one man in our past whose chemical attraction was so strong it could pull us out of ourselves and our better judgment, despite the consequences? From this novel, I'm guessing Emily Giffin does.