Shell Roush > Recent Status Updates

“But I have a stubborn, pointless wish not to be the only one who notices the broken things. Everyone glides by, not seeing the problems, not seeing the one who fixes them.” Page 13

Does this get better? I’m having a hard time getting into it. Highly rated on here and was a Goodreads Choice but I’m a little bored.

And 42 uses of “wink”

Goodreads, you telling me this is a 4+ star book… hire letting me down

There are 150 uses of some version of the word “smirk” in this book. No one smirks that much. I don’t know if I can finish this book.

I just got to the twist, around 70% of the way through the book. No, I didn’t guess it. Because it’s weird as hell. But now, I’m left wondering what else is left in the book. I’ll admit that I want to mark this one DNF and move on, which I rarely, rarely do. But I’ll give the rest a shot. I have a hard time believing it will get better after this twist.

I his book immediately pulled me in.

But several chapters ago, I got the idea of where this was all going and now I’m just distracted by it getting to the reveal. Maybe I’m wrong.

Still a suck-you-in read though.

“After fifteen years, love isn’t just a feeling,” he says. “It’s a choice.”

“You have the luxury of time, until you don’t- and then it becomes clear what’s most important.”

“It was in that moment that I realized something about human beings: We always care. Even when we don’t care, or we don’t want to care, or we’ve been broken beyond the capability of caring… We always do. It’s our ultimate infallibility.

Russ presents himself as the perfect guy. He works hard for his family, wants to give them everything, and would do anything to make his wife happy. Meanwhile, Vivian is presented as self-absorbed, frivolously spending money, worried about her me time, not caring about anyone else’s feelings.

It’s never that simple.

“You remember your first love because they show you, prove to you, that you can love and be loved, that nothing in this world is deserved except for love, that love is both how you become a person, and why.”

“You remember your first love because they show you, prove to you, that you can love and be loved, that nothing in this world is deserved except for love, that love is both how you become a person, and why.”

“We started talking to each other like people who used to be close- catching each other up on our lives rather than living them together.”

“In the best conversations, you don’t even remember what you talked about, only how it felt.”

“Our hearts were broken in the same places. That’s something like love, but maybe not quite the thing itself.”

“I wonder if I fucked it up. But if I hadn’t done it, I’d have wondered something else. Life is a series of choices between wonders.”

“Worrying is the correct worldview. Life is worrisome.”

“Worrying is the correct worldview. Life is worrisome.”

“Whether it hurts is kind of irrelevant.”
“That’s a pretty good life motto.”

“True terror isn’t being scared; it’s not having a choice in the matter.”

“True terror isn’t being scared; it’s not having a choice in the matter.”

“I can’t. I just can’t. And all you’re doing is making me feel worse about my life. You’re telling someone in a wheelchair ‘Walking is awesome. You should get up and walk.’ It’s not that easy.”

“Love has nothing to do with what you’re looking at, and everything to do with who’s looking”

I want to like this book more than I do. There are some many lovely and thought-provoking quotes I could pull from it. But it's also really, really slow.