I've read a lot of romance novels, but we all know that they aren't real life. This isn't that. It is, what it says on the cover, a love story. It touched me in an unexpected way. It is literary, but less so that I was afraid of it being. Details are omitted where they aren't needed, which leads to untraditional storytelling, but allows the messages to shine through clearer.

This novel spoke to me about what it really is to love someone, and to be with them. As a woman, especially a woman of this time (I am only a year older than Hero) you are raised to want independence. To want your own dreams, your own life, your own personhood; but still, you cannot escape the trap that you are also supposed to eventually be a wife and mother. But you still want to be YOU. This is what Hero is up against as she takes a week to decide if she wants to love and marry a man, the best man she has ever known, and if she has to lose part of herself in the process.

The answer is complicated, and she needs these seven days to work through it. In a similar place in my life, this book reached me, and I felt the weight of her decision. We're always told that love is work and compromise, but how much is really okay? How much is too much? And how do we know before it's too late? And when it isn't too much, how do we make peace with it really being okay?

In the final chapter, Hero tells the story of her mother's friend, a writer, who had a shed to write in away from her husband and sons. You'd think from this, that she needed to be alone to create. But later, when her sons are grown and her husband leaves, she can't write anymore, because her heart isn't in it. Being alone isn't better. It's about balance.

This isn't a romance novel. But it is a love story.