The Love of My Youth: A Novel Review

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(More customer reviews)If ever you've considered revisiting the lost love of your youth...or have actually done it, then this is without question a book I think you'll want to read and will long remember.
Superbly constructed and beautifully written by master storyteller Mary Gordon, this is the tale of Miranda, now an epidemiologist, and Adam, now a music teacher, who fell in love at 16 only to watch a mutually presumed "forever" blow up in their faces in their early twenties. There's been no contact since and, now, 36 years later, all that remains are the not-quite-buried residues of gnawing anger for her and gnawing guilt for him. Both have families, have done well for themselves and are about to turn 60. When a mutual friend from college days learns, quite serendipitously, that both Adam and Miranda are in Rome, where she now lives, she invites them to her family's apartment for dinner. Each of them is wary, discomfited and not at all sure this is a good idea, but the invitations are accepted and eventually the apology that one came looking for and the forgiveness the other sought will become something more: a search for understanding and an answer to the unanswerable questions "Am I the person who I was?" and "What has become of me?"
To that end, our protagonists will devote a part of each day of Miranda's three-week stay to walking and talking together and gradually coming to terms with their past and each other while exploring many of the glories that are Rome. Each of the present-day chapters features a different Roman destination...a church, a museum, a restaurant, a garden, an iconic statue ...while every now and then the author's voice interrupts to insert a chapter of backstory. I loved it.

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