Before We Were Strangers: A Love Story Paperback – August 18, 2015

“I hoped that through the lens I would see her again, like I had years before. Her vibrant spirit; the way she could color a black-and-white photo with her magnetism alone. I had thought about Grace often over the years. Something as simple as a smell, like sugared pancakes at night, or the sound of a cello in Grand Central or Washington Square Park on a warm day, could transport me right back to that year in college. The year I spent falling in love with her.”This book deserves all the stars and more, it lit me up inside immeasurably. If Before We Were Strangers hadn’t serendipitously entered my life, in a turn and rush of otherworldly, warming magic, it would’ve been its own tragically missed connection. Matt and Grace meet in college and have an instantaneous, but beautifully built connection and layered sense of personhood, filled with taking photos together and of Grace, who becomes a delicately enrapturing muse of her own, since Matt is an aspiring photographer, eating breakfast for dinner in their pajamas, the rich scent of pancakes on the griddle wafting through their best kept memories, slow dancing together to U2’s “With or Without You” like it’s the most natural thing they’ve done, like it’s the thing they’re meant to do in smooth, rapturous poetry that takes on a life of its own as does their intimate moments, and Matt listening to Grace, a budding musician, harmoniously play the cello through the dorm wall they share together and for him.Years later in this majorly dually narrated story, Matt wonders where everything went wrong and how they got so far from the people that fell so madly, passionately in love with each other. Then he sees Grace on the subway after years have gone by, but doesn’t realize it’s her until it’s too late and the train is pulling away as she seems to mouth “Matt” from the train with bewilderment besetting her eyes as if it’s hard to believe he’s really there after so long. He runs down the platform, trying to reach her in any way he can, but as all great, prolific love stories go the universe has other ideas and has seemed to “tease” them as Grace so eloquently explains it later. Matt then precedes to put out a letter to his “green-eyed lovebird” written in the missed connections section that implores her to come back to him again.This book makes me ache for all the time missed in our fleeting existences and the time we waste with not being with someone who we know we love because of our own Greek tragedy-like tragic flaws, all the connections lost because of uncontrollable circumstances, fickle, ever evolving feelings, people meeting at the wrong time, or anything out of place, or misunderstood, that leads to a breakdown in communication. It caused me to feel the pain, and ever expanding, deepening hole, that these two characters had in their hearts and felt after longing to be together after fifteen years.This is truly a movingly written, powerful story, about being enthrallingly, heart poundingly young and in love, that interweaves the past, the present, and the future all in one with a sensitive eye to all the important, eye-opening details. There is also plenty of humor infused, which led me to smile and laugh simultaneously with all I have, like a certain teacher’s name and Matt’s sometimes less than charming family members, one who believes he is the living incarnate of Adonis.While it is a love story, it is also a story of how life doesn’t always work seamlessly in favor of love and how unreliable it can be, how heart shattering it can be. We put ourselves out there hoping we won’t get hurt, it’s the most brave, ambitious, vulnerable, thing we can do and part of ourselves we can share and give, but sometimes it fails us and leaves in its wake a irresolvable heartbreak, lack of closure or too much black-and-white closure that something and two people will never be, or pining nostalgia for the memories of when things were good and we had someone to soften the way life gets lonely. And that’s the unfortunate give and take of existence and loving and the ultimate price we have to play to be romantically loved in the first place.Most of all, this story and these characters filled me with countless feelings, very soul and spirit filling, and I was invested at every step of the way. It is special and will be rendered in my mind forever with the permanence and profoundness of a photograph with a touch of color.

Before We Were Strangers by Renee Carlino4.5 stars!!“Once there was a you and me.We were lovers.We were friends.Before life changed.Before we were strangers.Do you still think of me?”For me this was one of the cleverest blurbs I had ever read, if any blurb pulls you in, it would be this one. As soon as I read it, I wanted it and I had been itching for release day. The pull from the heart on the sleeve post had me salivating for more; I wanted to know all about M and his Green-eyed Lovebird.I love second chance love; there is something about revisiting old feelings that makes the new ones that bit deeper. I understand that some don’t work because you obviously split for a reason but when that reason is miscommunication it always leaves it open ended with no closure and that was exactly the situation that these two found themselves in.“You have to learn to fly before you can soar.”Even though they had been apart for so long, they had never forgotten each other and that was the one thing that kept me going. That initial love was bone deep and that kind of love is hard to forget and with a life full of “What If’s” these two needed to reconnect, I was praying that they did.“…that’s why my mother always said we memorialize our past. Everything seems better in a memory.”Grace and Matt’s story spans over fifteen years and flicks back from past to present. Normally this can be confusing if not executed right but with these past chapters we were treated to a first love that I was glad I hadn’t missed. It was these past chapters that gave us real insight into these two as a couple and what had really happened all those years ago that eventually led to them being estranged.Matt and Grace met at University, both were oddballs in their day but their weird and quirky ways drew them together. They both had a flair for the arts and it was this mutual love that drew them together in a firm friendship. It takes a while for those lines to blur and blur they do and soon their friendship turns to love and it was a soul mate kind of love, I felt it all. Sometimes though, all good things come to an end and end they do, it hurt…for them and for me too.“You can’t recreate the first time you promise to love someone or the first time you feel loved by another. You cannot relive the sensation of fear, admiration, self-consciousness, passion, and desire all mixed into one because it never happens twice. You chase it like the first high for the rest of your life.”Fast forward to the present and a chance glimpse on a crowded platform leads Matt into trying to find the once love of his life. It was so beautiful. I really want to go into details, but I can’t. I could go on for an eternity about the love I had for this couple but I won’t. You need to experience this journey yourself.Renee Carlino has this knack of drawing you into her characters hearts and heads. You live and breathe their story and this one is no different. My heart was pumping for the majority of this book and I was rooting for these two from the very beginning. Yes, miscommunication is one of my pet peeves but the way that this was executed into this story, it worked and even though I should have been annoyed, I wasn’t. Yes I was annoyed at the characters but I understood to a degree, my only little niggle was that I felt that Matt didn’t try hard enough after they split to find her, but again, I could understand.“The present is our own. The right-this-second, the here-and-now, this moment before the next, is ours for the taking. It’s the only free gift the universe has to offer. The past doesn’t belong to us anymore and the future is just a fantasy, never guaranteed. But the present is ours to own. The only way we can realize our fantasy is if we embrace the now.”There was one plot device that I saw coming a mile away, but again, it worked. I did think it was all a bit anti-climactic when it was revealed as I thought the twist may have been something else but none the less this did nothing to detract what was an emotional, extremely engaging read. This was one of those reads that I can see myself re-reading over and over again. While the characters may not have been perfect, they were together and they were to me. While their time may not have been in the past they now had a chance at a future and it is this that keeps those pages turning. A beautiful, entrancing, thoroughly engaging read that I couldn’t put down and one that I can highly recommend.“…my life wasn’t real without you. It was just a series of days all strung together by a bunch of regrets.”