The Last Love Note by Emma Gray

 

Summary (from the publisher): You may never stop loving the one you lost. But you can still find love again.

Kate is a bit of a mess. Two years after losing her young husband Cameron, she’s grieving, solo parenting, working like mad at her university fundraising job, always dropping the ball—and yet clinging to her sense of humor.

Lurching from one comedic crisis to the next, she also navigates an overbearing mom and a Tinder-obsessed best friend who's determined to matchmake Kate with her hot new neighbor.

When an in-flight problem leaves Kate and her boss, Hugh, stranded for a weekend on the east coast of Australia, she finally has a chance, away from her son, to really process her grief and see what’s right in front of her. Can she let go of the love of her life and risk her heart a second time?

When it becomes clear that Hugh is hiding a secret, Kate turns to the trail of scribbled notes she once used to hold her life together. The first note captured her heart. Will the last note set it free?

The Last Love Note will make listeners laugh, cry, and renew their faith in the resilience of the human heart—and in love itself.

Review: Two years ago, Kate lost her young husband. Now she's still deep in her grief, trying to raise her young son Charlie, and trying to keep up at work. Stranded during a week trip with her good friend and boss Hugh, she takes the opportunity to spend a few days away and process her grief away from her child and the pressures of home. While Kate wants to move on and attempt to love again, she knows she needs to take some time to herself and figure out what she really wants. Along the way, she reflects on her relationship with her husband Cam and finds a few last notes he wrote tucked inside one of his jackets, that help her process more of what he went through in his last months. 

What Kate has gone through is absolutely tragic. Her husband was a brilliant, accomplished man and they had a close, loving relationship. Watching his slow decline and death decades before she should have had to say goodbye is something that indelibly changes a person. But despite such a sad, sad story, the book did not make me feel particularly aggrieved while reading this. I'm not sure why. I think in part it is because the story is not written in chronological order. We know from the beginning that he has died so the reader accepts that outcome from the beginning. The story flips back and forth in time throughout so Cam really always felt sort of present. I think this would have been more effective for me if it had started with Kate and Cam, a wonderful loving couple, and then slowly built up to his death and then the slow rebuilding of her life amidst grief. While sweet and tender, Kate's narrative did feel sort of repetitive at the end. I would have liked more showing of the grief rather than Kate just saying how sad she was over and over.

It felt very obvious from the beginning that there was more to Kate and Hugh than Kate wants to acknowledge. It also seemed shocking to me that Hugh could have hidden the great secret from his past from her for all that time. It just felt like too big a secret for it to remain so. 

I did really love the epilogue and how beautifully the conclusion ties up the threads of Hugh and Kate's past. And it was so poignant learning that the author based this book off of her own experience of losing her husband. The complexity and different stages of Kate's grief certainly reflect a deep understanding of how it feels to lose the person you love. 

Stars: 3