Karen Kingsbury: Love Story

By Kelly Bridgewater

From the day they met, John and Elizabeth were destined to fall in love. Their whirlwind romance started when they were young college students and lasted nearly thirty years—until Elizabeth died of cancer.

So when John Baxter is asked to relive his long-ago love story with Elizabeth for his grandson Cole’s heritage project, he’s not sure he can do it. The sadness might simply be too great. But he agrees and allows his heart and soul to go places they haven’t gone in decades. Back to the breathless first moments, but also to the secret heartbreak that brought John and Elizabeth together.

At the same time, Baxter family friend Cody Coleman is working through the breakup of his complicated relationship with Andi Ellison. He is determined to move on when a chance sighting changes his plans—and heart. Can Cody convince Andi to give their love another try, or is it time for them to say goodbye, for good?

As school comes to an end, Cole presents his report on the love story between his grandparents John and Elizabeth Baxter. It is a tale that touches the hearts of the entire family, and one that causes Cole to better understand his own beginning.

From Amazon

 My Thoughts:

Karen Kingsbury's Love Story is all about nostalgia. If you were a fan of the Baxter series, then this is an addition to the series. While I enjoyed the first five Baxter series, or the R series as they are affectionally called, I didn't really like Love Story. The story John Baxter tells Cole is a story that fans of Kingsbury's Baxter series will be familiar with. I can't remember where in the twenty-four novels in the series that Kingsbury has told this story before, but I learned nothing new about the relationship between John and Elizabeth. So I was disappointed in that aspect. As an added bonus, Kingsbury threw in a dueling story with Cody and Andi, to show why their love just can't seem to work. After reading the first couple of scenes with them, I got bored and skipped their parts until the end of the book. Wasn't that interesting. To make the story even more nostalgia, Kingsbury threw in an update on Bailey and Brandon. Again, it paralleled her real life daughter, Kelsey, and I skimmed through these sections too. Overall, the story moved rather rapidly. A month in one novel with not a lot of action. More telling than showing. If you want to know what has been happening to the Baxters, then this might be the perfect novel for you, but for me, I didn't learn anything I didn't know, and I prayed the novel would hurry up and end.

I received a complimentary copy of Karen Kingsbury's Love Story from Howard Books, and the opinions stated are all my own.

My Rating: 2.5 out of 5 stars

Name an author who used to love and read all the time, but then their books became boring and you stopped reading their writings.