Review of 'Ordinary Love' - Marie Rutkoski

Ordinary Love is the story of Gen and Emily. From a fledgling relationship in their teens, circumstances – and their own personalities – force them apart and in their own way, each moves on with her life. However, not all loves can be forgotten. 

This is an achingly beautiful love story – two people clearly meant to be together, but their insecurities mean that they make mistakes and throughout the whole book the reader is asking the question of whether they will be able to overcome their own struggles successfully enough to be genuinely happy.  

Stories like this can run the risk of becoming angst ridden and overly introspective, but Ordinary Love avoids this trap. Both women have such genuinely hard choices to make and that they struggle to resolve these in a way that is both practical and centred around their own wishes, is only to be expected. The reader never gets frustrated with their decisions and inability to be honest with each other, because both are completely understandable. Instead, we are rooting for them to work things out because like all the best fictional relationships, these two characters are so clearly meant to be together, that we feel there is no other option. There ‘has’ to be a happy ending. But of course, at the back of our minds, we know the author may not feel the same way and so there is a sense of real jeopardy that things might not work out the way we want them to. 

The antagonist, Emily’s husband, Jack is also an interesting character, albeit not one I would wish to encounter in real life. Their story is an all too familiar one and makes for scary reading. It brings home quite how easy it is to end up stuck in a toxic relationship, isolated from your friends and family. That Emily is an intelligent, well-educated young woman is also vitally important because it breaks the stereotype that women who fall for the ‘charming’ men lack intelligence for not being able to see who they were before the relationship became serious. Away from the realm of fiction, it is so important that people recognise how easy it is for anyone to get taken in by such men and also how difficult it can be to leave the relationship. Too many people find themselves in this predicament and it’s important for literature to reflect this, if only to educate people about their own friends. 

This was a brilliant read and I loved it from start to finish.