Love of My Youth (Gordon)

Book Reviews 
Emotionally engaging and smoothly flowing, The Love of My Youth showcases Gordon's power to write with controlled urgency, without dissembling or exaggeration, to reveal truths that are hard to face in the unsparing light of day, but without which we could not see ourselves as we are.
Liesl Schillinger - New York Times Book Review


Gordon...writes of the affection and wistfulness one has looking at the self growing smaller in the rearview mirror. And as a soulful and spiritual writer, the author of Final Payments and Circling my Mother, she is in many ways just the person to write such a book.... [The Love of My Youth] provides us a nice leisurely space to wander—and wonder.
Karen Sandstrom - Cleveland Plain Dealer


Thoughtful and moving, Gordon's latest captures the ardor and vulnerability of young love and the cautious circumspection of middle age. Miranda and Adam began a love affair in high school that endured through college only to end in a painful betrayal. When a mutual friend brings them together in present-day Rome, they haven't seen each other in more than three decades. Adam's ambitions to be a concert pianist never came to pass, and Miranda, once convinced that political activism could change the world, is now an epidemiologist. Both have married and raised children, but Rome still holds passionate memories for them. Though wary, they meet for daily walks, and Gordon's vividly detailed descriptions make Rome a palpable presence. Miranda and Adam tentatively reveal to each other the events of their lives, touching on aspirations, disillusionments, ideals, and desires, and these conversations set the pace of Gordon's novel. Only when Miranda is about to leave Rome are they able to fully express their emotions and achieve catharsis. Gordon's (Pearl) restraint is admirable, gradually exposing the differences in character that spelled the inevitable demise of this relationship. An accumulation of detail breathes life into her characters, and the writer's affection for this beloved, eternal city is endearing.
Publishers Weekly


The most honest scene in Gordon's new novel (after Pearl) has a 60-year-old Miranda in front of the full-length mirror in her Rome apartment dressing for a reunion dinner with old friends. She will be seeing Adam, who, decades ago, she believed to be the great love of her life. As she rejects one outfit after another she also tries on and casts off variations on how she will behave at this awkward gathering. Annoyance, excitement, and pride jockey for position as Miranda recalls Adam's long-ago betrayal. Ironically, Adam is performing the same ritual in front of his own armoire. He knows Italy and offers to meet Miranda, there on business, for daily walks that prove to be as aimless as their conversation, in which they needle each other while skirting around their big questions. It's only through flashbacks and interior monolog that readers meet the passionate, activist firebrand that was Miranda and the intense, insecure pianist that was Adam. But who are they now? Verdict: Gordon's stellar literary reputation ensures that her fans will line up for this latest entry. Their enjoyment, however, may hinge on whether they believe that Adam and Miranda were in love in their youth or just in love with their youth. —Sally Bissell, Lee Cty. Lib. Syst., Ft. Myers, FL
Library Journal


The novel is also filled with small resonating details, from the architectural beauties of urban Rome to Adam and Miranda’s anxious glimpses of their aging bodies in front of hotel mirrors. The Love of My Youth is as much about how we feel about our past and the choices we made and make, as it is about the love story between two young people. —Lauren Bufferd
BookPage


(Starred review.) In her first novel since Pearl (2005), virtuoso and versatile Gordon offers brilliantly fresh takes on family conflicts, women's lives, war, and global suffering while ingeniously meshing classic love stories with modern mores, and ecstasy with wisdom, to create an enthralling drama of innocent passion, crushing tragedy, and the careful construction of stable, nurturing lives.... [An] alluring novel. —Donna Seaman 
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