My Last Love Story by Falguni Kothari.
Expected publication: January 23rd 2018.
Rating: 2.5/5
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“At once heartbreaking, delightful, and completely unexpected. A must-read!” –Sonali Dev, award-winning author of The Bollywood Bride “Promise me you’ll learn to cuss, learn to love again. Live again. Promise me you won’t give up on each other.” Simi Desai is thirty years old and her husband is dying of cancer. He has two last wishes in his final months: first, that she’ll have his baby so that a piece of him lives on, and second, that she’ll reconcile with her old flame, who just happens to be their mutual best friend. And so over the course of their last summer together, Simi’s husband plans a series of big and small adventures for this unlikely trio, designed to help them say goodbye to each other and prove to Simi that it’s okay to move on without him–and even find love again. Beautiful and poignant, Falguni Kothari’s My Last Love Story will pull your heartstrings as only unforgettable love stories can.
My Review I received this book via NetGalley in return for an honest review.I thought I knew what I was getting into when I started this book, but as it turned out… I really wasn’t. This really is a beautiful love story that cannot be considered a love triangle, they truly are a threesome and there is no denying it.
I’ll give it a try to summarizing this story with all its complexity glory, here we go; It tells the story of Simi, Nirvaan & Zayaan, aka the Awesome Threesome, they have been friends since their teens and at that time Simi and Zayaan had been in love and planned a future together. Until the night of their 18th birthday where a series of awful events took place and it changed the course of their lives forever.
Fast forward more than a decade later and we have Simi and Nirvaan married and Zayaan living with them. Nirvaan has terminal cancer and is making his life mission to bring his wife and best friend back together. A lot has happened in those years, some were spent a part from each other and for a group who always valued their friendship and “Everything we do, we do together” there’s been a lot of secrets between them that needs uncovering.
The story picks up with Nirvaan forcing Simi to have a baby with him before he dies, this is something I didn’t particularly enjoy and couldn’t get behind it. I tried to understand both sides but no one should never feel pressured to have a child if they’re not ready. As the story progressed, I could somehow overlook that and see the bigger picture of tangled circumstances, and that made me enjoy the book more.
Nirvaan was the center of the group at this point, where in their teens it felt like Simi was the center. But that’s not neither here nor there. Nirvaan knew Simi and Zayaan would do anything for him, he also knew that Simi and Zayaan loved each other more than they loved him and he was fine with that because he loved them so very much.
The writing was beautifully eloquent, but it took me a while to really get into the story because I’m not a fan of monologues, and the first 25% or so of the story was Simi taking us back throughout their lives and how they came to be who they are now, not only in the beginning but in the story in general there was a lot of background story that was only told us, where I would have preferred it to be shown. I believe that if the story went back and forth with flashbacks and real time, it would make it more interesting to read, or maybe start with the past and then flash-forward to where the story began. That’s just a personal opinion, of course.
Other than the writing style, my biggest problem with the story was how it ended, it built up the whole story to have Simi and Zayaan hash out what happened all those years ago and move on from it, yet we didn’t get to see that happening, we know it did, but we didn’t see Simi open up to Zai and how he’d take this new information. Plus, the fact that they completely ignored Nirvaan’s wishes didn’t sit well with me either.
With that I close the reasons I couldn’t bump up the rating for this book, it wasn’t a bad book on any account, it was a great story and I devoured in less than 3 hours, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t have some troubles with it.
