Review: Cicadas: A Totally Ordinary Epic Love Story by Avery Cockburn

Title: Cicadas: A Totally Ordinary Epic Love Story

Author: Avery Cockburn

Length: 454 Pages

Category: Romance

Rating: 5 Stars

At a Glance: Cicadas is utterly and unabashedly beautiful. It’s an uncommon sort of Romance with a familiar theme that delivers its protagonists to their happy ever after. It’s a totally ordinary love story wrapped in an entirely unique—and for those of us of a certain age, nostalgic—package.

Reviewed By: Lisa

Blurb: What if you had a second chance at a second chance?

One day in 1987

Budding scientist Joel and cowboy-quarterback Danny meet amid the arrival of seventeen-year cicadas. Like the loud, lusty insects, the boys bond through song, reveling in the heat and hope of early summer—until fate tears them apart.

One night in 2004

During the next wave of cicadas, Joel and Dan find their connection stronger than ever. Boyhood fascination becomes an irresistible (and inconvenient!) passion, one that will unite and divide them for another seventeen years.

One love to last a lifetime

At the dawn of 2021, Joel and Daniel reach out, and in a heartbeat, the years and miles between them fall away. But to make their next reunion last forever, they must face their troubled pasts and embrace their boundless future.

Review: “. . . their journeys had brought them to this place at this time and made them ready for each other.”

Thirty-four years. That’s the breadth of this story. Its depth lies in what happens to Joel Mendel and Daniel Evans through those years and how, despite time, distance, and life, the feelings born on a late spring day in 1987—when two seventeen-year-old boys met by chance, the cicadas sang for them, and the future was rife with possibilities—endured.

Cicadas is utterly and unabashedly beautiful. It’s an uncommon sort of Romance with a familiar theme that delivers its protagonists to their happy ever after. The years spent building to that point are not squandered, but rather, those years shape Joel and Daniel into who they must be to get to where they belong, even if there is a mournful note to their time apart. From politics to the pandemic, the world influences, and time renders the men in a sort of stasis even as they move through it and it passes them by.

Avery Cockburn commits to the bit in the most splendiferous way, from Joel’s buggy fascination that carries him through a career to Daniel’s fascination with Joel and the cicada song that provided the background music to their romance. Cicadas is a totally ordinary love story wrapped in an entirely unique—and for those of us of a certain age, nostalgic—package.