PamG is a long time fan of Smart Bitches Trashy Books. A former library worker at her alma mater (hs), she is now retired and devoting her time to reading and occasionally commenting on same. She also enjoys memorizing songs and poetry, spontaneously bursting into song, playing with the Merlin app on her phone, and writing the occasional poem.

…

I don’t ever remember giving a Squee grade before, but nothing else will adequately express my desire to evangelize this book. I want to praise it, but I NEED to share it. The voices in my head are whispering that no book is capable of making every reader happy, but my head just don’t care. It’s convinced that everyone should read this book.

I think the best books, the books that absolutely blow my mind, are the rare ones that startle me and show me things I’ve never seen before. Such books are grounded in the minutiae of real, ordinary life, but something in the writing is gloriously transformative.

Left of Forever is one of these.

Savor It is the first of DeWitt’s books set in Spunes, Oregon, a small town with a touch of quirkiness that is neither trite nor twee. Spunes is cold and gritty and gray with a down to earth quality that extends to its residents and deeply appeals to me. Savor It is centered on Sage Byrd and her relationship with big city chef Fisher. Left of Forever focuses on Wren and Ellis Byrd, who’ve been divorced for four years and still circle each other like two cats in a bathtub.

The story opens with Wren journaling about her ex and their relationship, with an eye towards achieving closure and moving on with her life. In fact, much of the story is told with journal entries, letters, phone calls, and texts. There is also more than one timeline, a dual first-person present-tense POV, and much contemplation of the MCs’ shared past. While I do enjoy epistolary elements, I am not a huge fan of present tense narration or multiple timelines. Both can seem gimmicky and confusing when badly handled. The timeline hopping may have been mildly confusing at first, but I’m delighted to say that the POV perfectly conveys both Wren’s and Ellis’s voices. Each is unique, and you always know whose head you’re in at any given moment.

Ellis and Wren’s bond goes back to their childhood friendship and evolved through the years. They had a child in their teens and both became fully committed parents. The one thing that has united Wren and Ellis in the years since their divorce has been parenting their son Sam to the best of their mutual abilities. Although the Byrd siblings and Wren’s mother remain close to both exes, Sam is the linchpin binding them, and Sam will soon be graduating from high school and leaving for college.

While Wren is contemplating closure, Ellis has found a tiny spark of hope. I won’t go into detail because that would be spoilery; the source of that hope is both a very original plot twist and somewhat problematic. It is evident within the first few chapters that whatever happened in their marriage, these two people love each other still. So when Sam elects to head off to UC Davis early in the summer, Ellis makes a case for both he and Wren accompanying their son and then spending a leisurely week travelling home to Spunes together. After some negotiation, Wren reluctantly agrees.

I was practically bouncing in my seat at this point, going full Kermit while screaming “Road trip!”

So that’s the set up. I want to talk about why I loved this book so much, but first I need to say a few words about tropes. It would be easy to describe Left of Forever as a second chance romance or give it one of those long friends-to-lovers-to-enemies-to-lovers ad nauseum labels. It would be so like me to squee over my favorite road trip trope. However, I feel that when we use tropes as a shorthand to label a book or–heaven forfend–a shortcut to create a trendy story, we do ourselves a disservice. If someone had recommended this to me as a second chance story, I might have rejected it out of hand, since I’m not a fan of that trope. On the other hand, you could put two meatballs in a toy car and roll it down your sidewalk, and I’d eat that up with a Spune. Cuz Road Trip! Also, Meatballs.

I loved that this book focused so singularly on the central couple even when only one of them was on the page or they were in a group of people. I like my romance surrounded by supporting characters who are fully realized even when they are only on page for a paragraph or two. I love descriptions of work, hobbies, specialized knowledge, food, landscapes–anything that adds telling detail to the story without the dreaded info dump. Left of Forever gave me all of that effortlessly, but never once strayed from the central couple’s journey toward understanding and healing. Ellis and Wren put so much effort into their interactions and were never afraid to show their work. At one point, Ellis shares wisdom that he credits to his therapist;

“Because when it comes down to it, on a physical level, feeling happy doesn’t take priority over surviving,” I say. “We’re programmed to remember the bad so that we know what to stay away from and how to keep going. That’s why the shit that hurts stands out in our minds. That’s why holding on to the happy takes work.”’

Ellis is such a great character because he can look back on his pain and use it to fuel his current efforts to do better. He is always visibly working on himself. The reader feels every increment of his growth. Truly, there is nothing sexier than radical honesty.

I also loved the way this story brought me to laughter or tears and sometimes both simultaneously. And I gotta tell ya, I HATE to cry. I mean, catharsis is definitely not my friend. There’s a visit to a winery at about midbook that was hilarious, excruciating and magnificently cringe-worthy. I laughed till I cried, and they were not “happy” tears. More like sympathy anguish. It was funny. It was painful. And most of all, it inspired progress in Wren and Ellis’s relationship..

While Ellis was apparently born serious, Wren approaches life with a lighter touch. She has a uniquely humorous voice. At one point, she and Ellis are talking about that time in their teens when they began to notice each other’s newly developed physical attributes. Ellis tells Wren:

“I remember when you showed up with new assets.” He nods at my chest, and I see the planes of his cheekbones turn pink.

The sight of that flush fascinates me. Ellis has licked and sucked and nuzzled my assets more times than I could possibly count. He has greeted them like sentient beings and whispered goofy things into them, held them to his ears like they were whispering back, buried his face between them while I laughed. He’s napped on them. He’s bitten and left marks. The fact that he could still blush over something so known is a revelation to me.

I love this passage not just for the humor, but also for the tenderness and the tone of fresh discovery. I also have to say that the slow burn at the beginning of this romance is somewhat compromised by the protagonists’ long standing biblical knowledge of each other. These people are all about the yearning and the emotion, and when that spark finally ignites, whoa! and damn! Even a serial lurve scene skimmer like myself would regret missing that emotional intimacy.

Ellis and Wren endured the same traumatic issues that eventually led to their divorce, yet at the same time experienced those events separately. They each developed coping mechanisms that unknowingly and unfairly burdened their partner. Weighed down with an excess of guilt and a lack of communication, neither of them had the ability or the distance to cope with the growing misery that led to their divorce. Their journey towards reconciliation is neither smooth nor simple; rather it is layered, complex, and utterly absorbing.

Wren and Ellis are, before all else, grown-ass adults who are capable of learning from their experience, both intellectually and emotionally. Spending this time with them was an honor and a pleasure. The fact that their divorce never meant they didn’t love each other suggests that their time apart may have not only been necessary but made them stronger as well. I am so happy to have encountered this book. Left of Forever sparked all the joy, and I cannot wait to read future books set in Spunes, OR. (Not to be confused with Forks, WA)