About Books #94: Two Like Me and You

I don’t know what I was expecting when I first started reading Two Like Me and You. However, whatever I expected? This book exceeded those expectations. By far.

I was offered an ARC by Netgalley in exchange for a review. All opinions are strictly my own.

The story

Edwin Green’s ex-girlfriend is famous. We’re talking cover-of-every-tabloid-in-the-grocery-store-line famous. She dumped Edwin one year ago on what he refers to as Black Saturday, and in hopes of winning her back, he’s spent the last twelve months trying to become famous himself. It hasn’t gone well.

But when a history class assignment pairs Edwin with Parker Haddaway, the mysterious new girl at school, she introduces him to Garland Lenox, a nursing-home-bound World War II veteran who will change Edwin’s life forever.

The three escape to France, in search of the old man’s long-lost love, and as word of their adventure spreads, they become media darlings. But when things fall apart, they also become the focus of French authorities. In a race against time, who will find love, and who will only find more heartache?

The opinion

This story really has it all. There’s romance, there’s history, there’s a chase for something possibly impossible that’s just crazy enough to be plausble. And throughout all of that, there’s an author who manages to get it just right every single time.

I mean, where do I begin, really? The slightly over the top-ness of just about everything that Garland says? The mystery that is Parker Haddaway, and the perfect pace with which the author manages to unveil just why and how she is the way she is? Or the melancholy, the acknowledgment of “why am I doing this” mixed with a heaping helping of “what am I even doing?” crossing through Edwin’s mind for just about the entirety of his narration.

As Edwin, Parker and Garland make their way through France, there’s a slow reveil of what exactly brought all three of them there. The culmination of that, which felt both so tragic and sad, but also so utterly perfect for each of these characters? The way the ending is hinted at-but-not-quite even from the first page. The way everything that happens seems just a little mad a bit insane… Yet I was so willing to go along in it, so rooting for them to find what they were looking for… That’s the signs of a great author for me.

The rating: 5/5

I don’ give 5 stars easily. I really don’t – I almost have to feel that a book changed me, or my perspective. But Two Like Me and You definitely did that – and it left me sitting there, just staring in front of me, and wishing to experience that entire thing again. I absolutely loved it! (Goodreads)

-Saar