I had no idea that there was a name for what I had felt all those years. I mean, there is a name for everything, we all know that right? Some obscure word that no one knows that describes the feeling of loneliness you get when you eat out alone after the age of 40, or maybe a word for buying up a lot of books and then leaving them lie unread somewhere.
But I never knew the word for not being loved in return. Un-reciprocated, maybe?
Layla is trying to lose herself in college. She has had a rough life already at her tender young age and just wants to forget about the man that she is in love with. The man that doesn’t love her back. Even after two years she is still hung up on the guy, still can’t stop thinking about him and certainly can’t stop loving him.
Until she starts seeing the same handsome stranger around everywhere, so she decides to follow him one day…right into his class. He is brooding, handsome, off-limits poet guy, so naturally Layla is instantly drawn to him. But he has his own family and his own issues, and he might just be the guy that breaks Layla for good.
So one might say that this was a jazzed up taboo teacher/student romance novel I suppose.
But I think that this book was more than that. I think that it was an examination on what it’s like to feel a passion for someone not of your choosing. The wild, crazy feeling that posses you to drive by their house or seek them out in any way becomes manic, too much to resist.
Amour Fou, crazy love, I will never forget that episode of The Sopranos.
I enjoyed the build-up between Layla and Thomas. You could almost feel the electricity between them while reading. You were pulling for them the whole time. Please fall in love! I just knew in my heart that it was going to happen to her again, that she was going to fall in love with another man that wouldn’t love her back.
This is what brought me so close to the characters in this story. I knew what they were feeling, had felt it in my gut and deep in my bones for many, many weeks, months and years at one point in my life. I always thought I was lovesick, but this book tells me different. I knew for certain that he didn’t, he did love me once but that was over and I was left still in love and without an explanation: I was in Unrequited Love at the time.
There were steamy sex scenes but in them the author was able to capture the passion and the chemistry of the two characters, leaving you wondering if a person ever really had a choice in the matter of love at all. Instead of leaving you heaving with wet underwear these scenes left you with a knot in your chest and a lump in your throat, torn at what had just happened, reeling with all the passion of it.
We have all been alive long enough to know that falling in love with someone that you can’t have will never end well. Never.
I even felt jealous of Layla, because she got an answer to her unrequited love, a reason that told her why he couldn’t love her back. That’s something that I never got, and for a minute I hated her for it.