Only Love Can Hurt Like This

January 9, 2023
At the start of this middling romance from Toon (Someone I Used to Know), architect Wren decides she needs a break from quaint Bury St. Edmunds, England, and sets out to spend the summer with her father on his new pick-it-yourself farm in rural Indiana. She’s nervous about the trip, as she’s spent very little time with her father and his new family since her parents divorced when she was six. Luckily, her half sister is more than ready to introduce her to the town’s limited entertainments, which puts her in the path of two handsome but brooding brothers, Anders and Jonas. At first, IndyCar engineer Anders’s taciturn and combative personality puts Wren off, but she warms to him when she learns his prickliness is driven by his concern for Jonas’s poor mental health. Anders has a heavy secret of his own, however, and it could halt his relationship with Wren before it can fully take off. It strains credulity that the small community wouldn’t already know Anders’s secret, making the reveal both unbelievable and jarring. Toon smooths out that rough plot twist with highly readable, emotional prose and a focus on how familial relationships evolve over time. It’s not particularly memorable, but it does what it sets out to do.

March 1, 2023
After a heartbreak, a woman visits family in Indiana to reevaluate her life and maybe even find new love. Wren's fiance has fallen in love with someone else and breaks up with her mere months before the wedding. Their English village, once quaint and comfortable, is now much too small for the both of them. On her mother's suggestion, Wren decides to fly out and spend the summer with her father, stepmother, and newly married half sister on their Indiana farm. Things are slightly tense, as Wren has never been completely at ease with her father since he left her and her mother for this new family when she was young, but maybe time together will begin to strengthen a weak connection. She also keeps running into Anders, the younger son of the farm next door, who's visiting from Indianapolis and still reeling from losing his wife four years earlier. The two are drawn to each other despite both of their hesitations, but a secret Anders is keeping threatens their newfound affection. Toon has constructed a very cozy, lived-in world of Indiana farms that's comforting both for Wren and the reader. The tangled web of relations in Wren's family and her journey to begin to heal some of the wounds of her childhood are the strongest parts of the novel, messy but real. Wren and Anders' relationship is a bit rushed; it feels more superficial when juxtaposed against Wren's complicated, realistic family relationships. Some plot threads go nowhere, and others appear out of thin air. Anders' big secret doesn't come into the story until two-thirds of the way through, complicating things but without much time for characters to explore or truly reflect on it. A weak romance but an interesting family drama.

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