Emily Giffin’s First Comes Love is a heartwarming and emotionally charged tale of two sisters, Josie and Meredith, grappling with the aftermath of a family tragedy. The novel expertly delves into themes of love, forgiveness, and the complexity of sibling relationships. Giffin’s character development is superb, making the sisters’ struggles and triumphs relatable. While some plot points feel a bit predictable, the engaging narrative and rich emotional layers keep you invested. A great pick for fans of family dramas that explore the intricacies of personal growth and reconciliation.

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In a nutshell, this is about two sisters' lives. They both let the death of their brother impact a lot of their decisions.

Meredith and her story get 1.5 stars at best. Josie gets 3. Since it is one book, I landed at 2.
(This is told in dual POVs.)

Meredith and her chapters were hard. She is SOOOO unlikeable. She hates her job, she hates being a mother, she hates being a wife, she hates her sister, she basically hates her life. There were zero redeeming qualities about her. Yet, her family views her as the "good" and "responsible" one. Responsible, sure. Good? She treats others like crap. Her husband should have taken their daughter and ran far, far away.

Josie on the other hand is supposed to be the careless and irresponsible one. Yet she teaches elementary school and has for a long time. Teachers, generally, are not irresponsible by nature. And Josie did not come off as careless or irresponsible. Impulsive, yes. Her story was a lot better, IMO. <spoiler> Though I think it would have improved if she actually got together with Pete. But at least the possibility of a future is there. </spoiler>

I received an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

Splendid story, beautifully written. I have enjoyed the characters and the setting.
This is such a nice book to read, highly recommended.

Thank you to Ballantine books and NetGalley for an advanced copy of this book. Emily giffen writes great stories about sisters and where they are now. The characters in this book were not as likable as some of her other books. This made it hard to get into the story and care about the outcome.

I enjoyed the book, but I think it was hard for me to really connect to the subject matter as an only child. I didn’t really like either Main character either…. It felt too formulaic in the plot line. Really enjoy Giffin’s working, so hoping this was just an attempt at something new.

The story is alternately narrated by Josie and Meredith which did work. The sisters are so different and getting a grasp of both of their perspectives and feelings gave a believable slant to the story. No one was portrayed as all good or all bad. We see the sisters as they are and We see both sides of every issue, and these sisters really did have issues. I saw a lot of reviews that people had a hard time liking the sisters and couldn't connect with them, but I found the way the story was told was more real. We saw them for who their really were, faults and all and it helped me to understand who they really were and why they were that way and it was easier to accept them as they were.

I loved this book. Giffin hits a homerun in this story centered around a family tragedy and how it can impact our life decisions, even when we may not ever realize it. Her characters were well-developed and likeable, and the complexity of family dynamics is very relatable. Highly recommend!

I'm a big fan of Emily Giffin, but this book was just eh for me. The story had potential, but noting ever really happened. I felt nothing for either of the main characters... and had trouble remembering whose point of view the chapter was being told from, from time to time.

I wanted to like this book, as I've liked Emily Giffin in the past, but the sisters, Meredith and Josie, fell flat with me. Without that connection, the rest of the book didn't hook me the way it should have, and I found myself not wanting to continue.

It is a pretty classic Emily Giffin book. I think it was a pretty entertaining book and very easy to read.

I enjoyed this story about two sisters. Giffin has a knack for writing relatable, readable stories about modern women. I recommend this book.

Back in the day, I really loved your first two books, Something Borrowed and Something Blue, and also liked the next two, Baby Proof and Love the One You’re With. I’m not sure why I stopped reading your books after that, except that I felt like perhaps they were moving from chick lit to women’s fiction, which is a distinction I mostly make by the age and marital status of the main characters. It’s not that one genre is better than the other; it’s just that I have a bit of a block about women’s fiction (though usually when I read it I like it fine). I think it comes from being a romance reader at heart and wanting the thrill of a new romance and the promise of an HEA, rather than the quieter and more ambivalent conflicts of women’s fiction.

Anyway, I’m also not sure what prompted me to request First Comes Love; from the description it sounded more women’s fiction-y than most: two sisters in their late 30s confront mutual and and separate challenges in their personal lives.

Set in Atlanta, First Comes Love focuses on Josie and Meredith as the 15th anniversary of their beloved brother Daniel’s death approaches. Daniel was the oldest, a medical student and golden boy who died in a car crash. His death splintered the family; their alcoholic father went off the rails and their parents eventually divorced. Josie and Meredith’s relationship, always contentious, worsened without Daniel’s steadying presence. Now both of the sisters are at a crossroads as old secrets brew and new opportunities arise.

Josie is 38, an elementary school teacher, and a middle child with the opposite of middle-child-syndrome. Daniel and Meredith were always the sober, responsible ones; Josie was the drama queen, exuberant and flaky. She hasn’t changed much over the years, to Meredith’s frequent chagrin. In spite of her wild child ways, all Josie has ever really wanted is to get married and have children. Now she’s facing a new school year and having her ex-fiance’s daughter in her class, just as she starts to wonder if she should give up on love entirely and consider single parenthood instead.

Meanwhile, Meredith is grappling with dissatisfaction on several fronts in her life. After Daniel died Meredith gave up her dreams of being an actress in New York and went to law school instead. She married Nolan, who was one of Daniel’s best friends, and now has a four-year-old daughter, Harper. While she loves Harper with all her heart, Meredith is starting to feel like the life she’s living is a mistake – wrong job, wrong husband – she feels trapped by her choices and increasingly wants to escape.

Josie and Meredith have always had a rocky relationship. They were close growing up, but perhaps it was a closeness mostly brought on by being two years apart in age and by physical proximity. Now they mostly seem to share history; their parents and their memories of Daniel tie them together. Josie relies on Meredith as a sounding board, albeit a disapproving one. Meredith seems to mostly view Josie as someone she can judge and feel superior to.

As someone with a sister, I could definitely relate at times to the siblings’ fraught relationship. But while I felt that the characterizations were supposed to be somewhat balanced, and the reader was perhaps to understand where both Josie and Meredith were coming from, that wasn’t the case for me. Sure Josie was flighty and a little self-centered. No, she wasn’t the most emotionally mature 38-year-old out there. But Meredith was in another category. Sour, angry, judgmental, and martyrish, Meredith was one of the most unpleasant protagonists I’ve come across in a while.

It doesn’t help that most of Meredith’s interactions in the book are with Josie and Nolan, the two people she seems to resent and, honestly, dislike the most. Late in the book the two are talking and Josie opines that, “Mere’s been in a bad mood since she came out of the womb.” Nolan, who seems generally loving and supportive of his wife, even if the sentiment is not returned, agrees. So it’s not just that she struck me as particularly unpleasant; even people that love her and tolerate her foibles acknowledge that she’s kind of permanently dissatisfied.

Anyway, I wouldn’t say that the imbalance really negatively affected my enjoyment of the book too much, except I probably would’ve liked to have Meredith get told off more than she ever actually does. It was more just odd to me because I wondered if it was *me* who just had a uniquely negative reaction to Meredith, and maybe some other readers would find Josie harder to take. In real life, I’d say I have qualities in common with both Meredith and Josie, and I’m equally intolerant of flakiness and excessive negativity. So I don’t think it was a personal thing.

I guess what it boiled down to for me was that while Meredith has myriad negative thoughts about Josie, Josie’s negative thoughts about Meredith are mostly about how Meredith treats her. So I couldn’t really see it as a balanced portrayal, where they both had to work at a better relationship.

(And weirdly, it made me think of Something Borrowed, and the relationship between Rachel and Darcy. In that book, told solely from Rachel’s perspective, she’s the uptight responsible one, but she’s a good friend and a good person, albeit one who sleeps with her best friend’s fiance. Darcy is charismatic and self-centered, a bit like Josie, but kind of a monster underneath – until she’s redeemed in her own book! It just intrigued me to see that a sympathetic first-person perspective makes a difference in how you view characters.)

As I said, in spite of my confusion about whether I was supposed to find Meredith and Josie equally sympathetic/aggravating, I actually did enjoy First Comes Love quite a bit. The writing is smooth and the story moves along at a nice clip. Also, and maybe this is a function of it not being romance – I really didn’t know what was going to happen in the end. Was Meredith going to dump Nolan? Was Josie going to go forward with her artificial insemination, and if so, with who? She has a sort of stealth romantic prospect that pops up but I kept expecting things to go in a different direction, but they didn’t, or at least not quite the way I expected them to. I really liked that the book surprised me and kept me wondering until the end.

One criticism – I wish Daniel had come alive somehow more in the story. He’s so at the center of things – the story begins with the girls’ mother thinking that the three of them should mark the anniversary with a trip to New York to visit Daniel’s old girlfriend, and as the book goes on a secret that Josie has regarding Daniel’s death starts to weigh more and more on her. His absence has a huge effect on most of the characters, but he never really felt real to me – perhaps because he felt a bit too idealized? To be fair, it’s perfectly natural that everyone who loved Daniel would idealize him after his young and tragic death; it was just that he lacked the depth and nuance that made him feel like a real character and thus made his loss feel like something the characters were actually dealing with.

In keeping with the genre, the story ends with a happily-ever-after-for-now; in other words, everyone is a bit better off than they started (though with Meredith we’re really grading on a curve; she was so miserable and unpleasant for most of the book that her efforts in the end to be less miserable and unpleasant, however incremental, felt like a victory). Anyway, my grade for First Comes Love is a solid B+, and I won’t wait so long again to pick up another Emily Giffin novel.

I know this book is about the sibling bond, but why do you need to leave me hanging in regards to Pete? He seems like a great guy, and I truly was hoping he and Josie would just get together, with her dropping her silly sperm donor idea and just having a kid naturally.

First Comes Love is mildly entertaining, so not my favorite Emily Giffin novel. The story is forgettable. There are sisters who are opposites, a family broken by death, and secrets. The story is written well, but the substance is just not enough to keep you really invested.

Josie and her sister Meredith lost their brother 15 years ago in a tragic car accident. Their relationship and as well as their parents have never been the same since. As they try to move past their loss, it seems that everybody has lost insight of what really matters to them.
Josie, a first grade teacher, realizes she is missing something in her life. She's alone, unmarried and no children, but she swearing off love. LOL!
Meredith is married with a 4 year old daughter, a successful lawyer, but also feels like her life isn't complete.

The concept of the story was great, but I felt like it dragged on too much. You are invested in their lives and you are rooting for them to make things work, to get past their tragedy of a love one dying, but I feel like it's their excuse to not move forward. And the sisters want to bash the ones who do move forward.

While not my favorite Emily Griffin novel and I am a great fan, I still recommend this book as it isn’t formulaic. She confronts how one can feel when they haven’t fallen in love or have a challenging relationship with a sibling. Emily consistently brings to life the settings so the reader feels as if she has stepped right into the story. This is a worthy read!

I included this on a blog post about the books everyone will be talking about this summer:

I haven't read a Giffin book since 2005's Something Blue, but I plan on reading this one in the coming months. By the pool, of course. Her latest novels tells the story of two sisters whose lives couldn't be more different who find themselves at a crossroads, against the backdrop of the rapidly approaching anniversary of a family tragedy. It sounds rather grim, but early reviews use words like "witty" and "dazzling." Publication date June 28 2016.

Meredith and Josie are sisters and are about as different as different can be. Meredith is a lawyer and married with a young daughter while Josie is a 1st grade teacher and still single. Both seem to be living the perfect life, but both feel like something is missing and it seems like all the answers are all linked to the most pivotal day in their lives- the day their brother was killed in a freak accident.

In true Emily Giffin fashion she has a way of creating characters that you love and feel for despite not really liking them all the time or their actions. I really enjoyed how this story was centered around a sibling relationship. It’s different than her other stories which seem to have romantic relationships as a focal point. The only thing is that I feel like this book needed an epilogue. It almost seemed like it ended too suddenly.

The story is alternately narrated by Josie and Meredith which did work. The sisters are so different and getting a grasp of both of their perspectives and feelings gave a believable slant to the story. No one was portrayed as all good or all bad. We see the sisters as they are and We see both sides of every issue, and these sisters really did have issues. I saw a lot of reviews that people had a hard time liking the sisters and couldn't connect with them, but I found the way the story was told was more real. We saw them for who their really were, faults and all and it helped me to understand who they really were and why they were that way and it was easier to accept them as they were.