Sarra Manning - London, With Love

Sarra Manning - London, With Love  

3 ⭐

Genre: Romance, Contemporary Fiction, Fiction, Chick Lit, Contemporary 

Pages: 432

Format: Netgalley / Ebook

Publisher:  Hodder & Stoughton 

Date Published: 5th May 2022

 

Book Blurb: 

London. Nine million people. Two hundred and seventy tube stations. Every day, thousands of chance encounters, first dates, goodbyes and happy ever afters.

And for twenty years it's been where one man and one woman can never get their timing right.

Jennifer and Nick meet as teenagers and over the next two decades, they fall in and out of love with each other. Sometimes they start kissing. Sometimes they're just friends. Sometimes they stop speaking, but they always find their way back to each other.

But after all this time, are they destined to be together or have they finally reached the end of the line?

My Review: 

I thought this book is going to be similar to Love, Rosie by Cecelia Ahern, which is one of my favourite books ever, so I had high hopes for London, With Love. However, apart from beautiful writing this book was too long, and I didn’t really believe the love and chemistry between the two main characters. Also, the miscommunication trope in this book just made me so angry. Both of the main characters were just so childish and too stubborn to admit their feelings. Also, some of the events in this book were quite triggering and happened without any warning…yet felt that including those events wasn’t necessary to make this book good.

The story follows Jen and Nick, who became best friends in college when both were 16 and see them fall in and out of each other’s lives over the course of the next 35 years. The book also uses the London tube as a backdrop to all the important events and meetings that happen in both Nick’s and Jen’s life.

I didn’t like Jen’s character that much. For me, it felt like she didn’t grow up and her character development was non-existent until the last 10% of the book. Also, for someone with two degrees and being quite well educated she lacked common sense and was very naïve, which was just very unbelievable. Nick, for me, was quite a mystery, as we get to know him only from Jen’s POV. I didn’t feel much romance and feelings between the two of them in this book, it felt more like a childhood crush for me.

What I liked in this book is the beautiful writing and scene setting, as well as the beautiful descriptions of London. The author perfectly explores how London changed from 1986 to 2021.

Overall: I had such high hopes for this book but was quite disappointed with a very mediocre romance that didn’t feel that realistic. I couldn’t connect with the main characters or believe their feelings towards each other. The book itself also felt a bit too long, and the inclusion of three major events without a trigger warning nearly made me DNF this book. Writing and exploration of London was beautiful though. 

This review was first published on Netgalley: 

https://www.netgalley.co.uk/book/247768/review/959200

About the Author:

Sarra Manning is a teen queen extraordinaire. She spent five years working on the now sadly defunct J17, first as a writer and then as Entertainment Editor. She then joined the launch team of teen fashion bible Ellegirl, which she later went on to edit and has consulted on a wide range of youth titles including Bliss, The Face and More.

Sarra is now editor of What To Wear magazine. She's also been a regular contributor to ELLE, The Guardian, ES Magazine, Seventeen, Details and Heat and wrote the Shop Bitch column for Time Out. Sarra lives in North London with her dog Miss Betsy.

http://www.sarramanning.co.uk/