This Is a Love Story
Abe and Jane have been together for decades. The book opens with them reflecting on their marriage, remembering the idyllic early days, the tough ones in the middle, and cherishing their current moment. Jane is an artist and Abe is a writer. They're parents to Max. They're partners. They've walked through it all.
This book had a strong opening and ending. I liked the way that Abe and Jane communicated in these sections, catching the remnant of a thought, recording partial memories, and tiring before recalling the whole story. The way postpartum depression is represented, along with the struggle to be an independent person and artist while also raising a dependent and aligning one's life with a partner felt true to life.
Interspersed throughout are vignettes of Central Park, all the people who frequent it, smaller portions of the park, particular benches, community groups, and the like; it's an homage to New York City. For the most part I liked these asides, but sometimes struggled to focus in on them. I think they may have had important messages buried within and I found myself tuning out just a tad.
I also got a little lost during the Max sections and didn't feel as connected to him as a character. That being said there were still some thought-provoking and lovely passages in his POV.
On the topic of POV, the Jane and Abe sections were initially hard for me to parse because this book lacks quotation marks—not an issue in and of itself, but it took some getting used to along with the poetic style, sentence fragments, and the quick shifts from Abe's voice to Jane's. I didn't always know who was remembering which part of a paragraph.
Overall, despite my momentary disconnectedness (which could have had more to do with timing than the actual book), I think this was a beautifully written book about love and family and an ode to Central Park, writers, and artists everywhere.
