Miss You by Kate Eberlen
Publication Date: April 4, 2017
Source: Vine
"TODAY IS THE FIRST DAY OF THE REST OF YOUR
LIFE." Tess can’t get the motto from her mother’s kitchen knickknack out
of her head, even though she’s in Florence on an idyllic vacation before
starting university in London.
Gus is also visiting Florence, on a holiday with
his parents seven months after tragedy shattered their lives. Headed to medical
school in London, he’s trying to be a dutiful son but longs to escape and
discover who he really is.
A chance meeting brings these eighteen-year-olds
together for a brief moment—the first of many times their paths will crisscross
as time passes and their lives diverge from those they’d envisioned. Over the
course of the next sixteen years, Tess and Gus will face very different
challenges and choices. Separated by distance and circumstance, the possibility
of these two connecting once more seems slight.
With comparisons to One Day by David Nicholls
(which I loved), I knew I had to read Miss You. The novel is told from points
of view alternating from Tess and Gus over the course of 16 years. The two are from very different backgrounds.
Tess is working class and Gus comes from a privileged family. Yet both of them
share idealistic, romantic souls and big hearts. Both of them happen to be in
Florence in 1997. They’re perfect for each other. And they happen to be in the
same church at the same time. The beginning of a meet cute –right?
But they do not meet – at least formally. It is a missed connection that lasts for 16
years where Tess and Gus, through the ups and downs of their separate lives,
“meet” at different tangents but never connect. I fell in love with them both,
crying over their heartbreaks and tragedies. Tess and Gus go through so much
that by the time the final chapters come around, where the reader knows they
are finally destined to truly meet, they’ve earned it. It is an instant love that isn’t actually –
not with all the disappointments and trials both have had to endure to finally
get their fairy tale ending.
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