There are many kinds of love: a first love, an intoxicating but acquisitive love that leads to marriage, the love that keeps a woman in an abusive marriage, and a second chance at first love, where the feelings and the desire are just as strong if not stronger.
Emily and Gen meet in fifth grade and become friends at their small-town Ohio high school. The two lonely girls both have bright futures. Emily is clever and destined to leave for Harvard, while Gen is living with her grandmother after suffering the loss of her mother to drug addiction. She is also bestowed with extraordinary running abilities. As the school year finishes, the girls’ friendship turns into something more, but they fail at a long-distance relationship when they go to university.
Life goes on. Gen pursues a remarkable career as an athlete and Emily is swept off her feet by a charming and wealthy financier Jack. Soon she has two children but the marriage becomes difficult. Jack’s extreme parenting and her concern for her children leads Emily to leave the marriage. It’s a move that Jack doesn’t take seriously, but it gives Emily space to return to her writing and her friends.
At a charity event, Emily and Gen enter each other’s orbits once more. On the surface they are quite different people: Gen is a famous and wealthy athlete while Emily is a beautiful, well-heeled mother of two who lives in an Upper East Side townhouse in Manhattan. But at their core they are the same Ohio teens they once were.
Ordinary Love explores the value of good friends and of family, as Emily and Gen navigate a possible way forward, their friends supporting them during this exciting, confusing reunion.
Emily asks her friends to forgive her for distancing herself from them after failing to follow through on previous separations from Jack, while Gen’s friends are her family and help show Emily the authentic person Gen is, despite the rarefied world she moves in.
After isolating herself from her parents, Emily has another chance with them, though it’s complicated. Gen, meanwhile, has remained close to her grandmother, who is all the parent she needs.
Rutkoski, the author of several novels for children and young adults, has created a touching, sensitively portrayed love story that has the reader rooting for the two amid their complicated lives. It becomes clear that they will sacrifice anything for each other, which is perhaps what love truly is.
Ordinary Love, by Marie Rutkoski (Virago, $37.99), is out now.
