Love the One You're With by Emily Giffin

I give this one a B- , the type of grade you would give to a student who wanted to do well in the class, but who didn't have enough motivation or interest in the material to produce good quality work. .

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First of all, the description of the book, as well as the first chapter, was a little misleading to me. I thought the story would be about a married woman whose former "true love" returns, then which causes her to betray her husband and rethink what true love really is. In a sense, this does occur in the book, just not in a way I'd expected..

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Former lover Leo appears in the first few pages, 10 years after leaving the protagonist Ellen. Right off the bat he seems like a slime ball of a bad-boy who wants Ellen and has no respect for the fact that she is married. For the next 90 or so pages Ellen explains her past and how she ended up where she is today: married to her best friend's brother Andy. I felt this setup was a bit long and boring. I wanted to hurry up and get into the real plot of the story already.

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Most of the novel is spent inside Ellen's head. She secretly lusting over Leo and their past, all the while wondering if she should call him or not. The core problem seems to be Ellen's rethinking of her current life and whether or not she likes it. On the one hand she has sweet, two-dimensional Andy. Perfect in most ways, yet not that exciting. With Andy she lives the prized life of Southern yuppydom without the need to work another day of her life.

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On the other hand there is Leo. Basically the complete opposite of Andy.

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I was dissapointed to find that while I liked Andy, there wasn't a very tangible connection between him and Ellen on the pages. He was definitely the better guy between him and Leo though, so I wasn't very conflicted with who I wanted Ellen to end up with. Not much even happens plot-wise. Leo is hardly in the book at all. Ellen sees him maybe three times total, sends him a few e-mails, and that's that. Pretty boring stuff. I sniffed the ending from 100 miles away, and even then it wasn't entirely believable.

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Giffin had a good idea with this book, but ruined it by spending too much time in Ellen's head instead of making anything happen. Also, the other characters in the story deserved way more development than they got. This book is definitely my least favorite of Giffin's four works. Something Borrowed and Something Blue are far better. I recommend reading those instead, especially for a good summer read.