Newly divorced and lonely, Layla Hilding cautiously gets to know a newly-separated dad whose daughter attends the elementary school where she teaches music.
For some, your 30s are a time of growing as a family, buying your first home, and furthering your career, while others discover during this time that the person they thought they were going to happily spend their rest of their life with is virtually a stranger. Tracey Garvis Graves’ new novel, Heard It In a Love Song, is for anyone nursing a broken heart after finding themselves unexpectedly single after their relationship has crashed and burned.
This novel tells the story of Layla and Josh, two Millennials in their 30s, who are at the end of their marriages. Layla is a former musician on the local scene who now teaches music at the school where Josh’s daughter is in Kindergarten. When these two newly singles meet in the school carpool line, they form a relationship that is first based around Josh’s daughter, but later grows into something more.
I will be the first to admit that Heard It In a Love Song was not what I expected. About half of this novel takes place in the past, detailing the start and end of both Layla and Josh’s former relationships turned marriages. These flashbacks are interspersed with the present day narrative, gradually giving us a glimpse into what happened in the characters’ previous relationships.
As you can tell, this strategy makes for a novel that is much more introspective and reflective than you might assume from the synopsis. So much of the book is spent on moving past the heartbreak of losing a former love and finding yourself again after loss. I found Graves’ writing to be very true-to-life and I thought that she captured the intricacies and intimate entanglements of relationships quite well, showing how people become attached and fall apart, yet stay together for longer than they should because of what they had.
This novel is much more a story of moving on after loss and reclaiming one’s power than it is a romance. If you like books that go deep into the matters of the heart, then this one is for you.
Availability: Book Rating: **** Stars (I really liked it) Reviewer: Brooke, Public Relations Librarian
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GENRE: Love Stories; Mainstream Fiction
THEME: Second Chance at Romance (Tis better to have loved and lost and loved again.)
STORYLINE: Character-Driven TONE: Moving
SUBJECT: Coparenting; Coping; Divorced Persons; Interpersonal Relations; Loneliness; Men/Women Relations; Single Parents; Teachers
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