Review: Sometimes Love Lasts by Jake Wells

Title: Sometimes Love Lasts

Author: Jake Wells

Publisher: Dreamspinner Press

Pages/Word Count:  246 Pages

At a Glance: This book is a 5k, not a short jog around the lake. But it’s so worth the time.

Reviewed By: Taz

Blurb: For Rone Forrester, life as a high school student is a roller coaster ride. Though he’s intelligent, good-looking, and athletic, true happiness eludes him. He’s lost his mother to cancer, his hypercritical father is a tyrant, and he spends most of his free time taking care of his little brother, Eli. And to make matters worse, Rone begins to have romantic feelings for his best friend, Carson Harrington.

When Rone is inadvertently outed, his life swirls into turmoil. His father’s homophobia and Rone’s embarrassment at the thought of facing Carson force him to flee to Los Angeles, where he hopes to find a safe haven. Instead, he quickly learns that every moment is dangerous for a homeless teenager. As time passes, Rone navigates through multiple challenges, makes friends who love him for who he is, works hard to achieve his goal of becoming a pediatric surgeon—with all its inherent triumphs and tragedies—and overcomes a failed relationship. Ultimately, his journey teaches him that in order to fulfill his dreams, he has to come to terms with his past.

Review: Sometimes Love Lasts is not a story, it’s a saga. It took me several sittings to get through it, mostly because after reading a few chapters I’d be emotionally exhausted and needed to get a little bit of sleep after staying up WAY too late. “I’ll just read one more chapter and then I’ll put the Kindle down.” Yeah, right.

What Jake Wells managed over the course of the book was to draw out each phase of Rone’s life. We are firmly rooted in his adolescence, getting a true understanding of his life, so that when fifteen years pass, we understand why he made the choices he did. This was quite an accomplishment since the choice Rone made was one that many people would find difficult to swallow. Still, given the experiences woven into the opening section of the book, we can understand Rone’s situation.

Jump forward fifteen years, and Rone is living an entirely new stage in his life. He’s scarred from his youth and finds relationships challenging, but most of this is because he’d never truly let go of his feelings for his childhood best friend. During this time, we see Rone go through his medical stages and work to make a serious relationship work.

When, in the last stretch of the story, his former life comes back to haunt him, I found myself riveted and unable to stop reading. I kept asking myself, “How can this author possibly make these reunions okay after all that’s happened?” Several chapters left me on the verge of tears, right up until I crossed the finish line and completed the story. No storylines were left open to interpretation. This book closes like a perfectly wrapped Christmas present.

When selecting this book to read…and you should…keep these things in mind. The book is long and emotional. It is not something you can pick up and enjoy for a short time and then move on. It also isn’t a book you can skim. So much of the storyline occurs in the description that the dialogue takes a back-seat. It was tough to suspend my disbelief to accept some of Rone’s reasoning along the way, but each time I found myself questioning, “What reasonable person would do such a thing,” the author provides a down-to-earth scene where Rone acknowledges his own flaws. On the flip side, scattered throughout are scenes that are so evocative, conveying the story in a deeply sensory way. Those moments, and there were many of them, kept me forging ahead.

Drama and angst at its finest, resolving in a delightfully happy ending. This book is a 5k, not a short jog around the lake. But it’s so worth the time.

You can buy Sometimes Love Lasts here:

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