Just Jennifer

Time travel, immortality and lost loves play a role in two, very different titles.

Before Forever After by Samantha Sotto (Crown, August 2011)

Shelley fell head over heels in love with Max on a very unusual tour she took in Europe. Now Max has been killed in a bombing and there is a young man, Paolo, standing on her front steps announcing that Max was his grandfather and is very much alive, making baked eggs and cheese on a remote island in the Philippines. Shelley is very shaken, but agrees to make the trip with Paolo where she is shocked to find that Paolo is telling the truth and that Max has been many men throughout history before he became the man who played strip Scrabble with her. An inventive story that shifts scenes between Shelly’s present, the time she was with Max and stories that Max told Shelly that she comes to realize are very relevant to their story.

Q: a [Timeless] Love Story by Evan Mandery (Harper, September 2011)

An unnamed protagonist falls head over heals in love with a young woman who is called Q. The two are very much in sympathy, he trying to write novels, she an organic gardener trying to save gardening space in Manhattan. A few months before their wedding, Q’s fiancé is approached by his older self who tells him he cannot marry Q, that it will ruin both of them. After he is convinced, he breaks off his relationship with Q, certain she is the only love of his life, but also convinced this is the best thing for both of them. During the course of several more years, he is visited by different versions of his older self, at different ages (time travel has become possible in the future, even accessible to the common person). Each time, his older self begs him to do something or beseeches him to stop what he is currently doing, altering the course of his life until he realizes he must go back to the moment where it all changed. Filled with “what-if’s”, this is a sweet love story, even if it is a bit unbelievable, and even if the future selves become annoying as they try and direct the life of a now lonely young man. An enjoyable read for anyone who ever wondered “what would happen if I…” for anyone who wished they could do part of their life over again and anyone who likes sweet love stories.