An involving, intoxicating, decades-spanning tale of love, friendship and longing that plunges its reader into a charged lesbian romance ... Some of the family backstory may be a little heavy-handed, but you never doubt Rutkoski’s central players. She is sharply observant about wealth and the rich, and thoughtfully insightful about how often lesbian culture exists unseen. Moving and tender, this is an immersive, glamorous, sexy and gripping modern love story to gulp down hungrily and quickly. It would make an ideally intense holiday read.
The sex scenes in Ordinary Love are some of the best I have read this year, and that Marie Rutkoski has a facility for writing physical intimacy that can elude even some of our most gifted authors ... It is in her exploration of the intricacies of family, as well as romantic relationships, that Rutkoski is at her most impressive. Parenthood and childhood are explored, but so are kinship care and the notion of surrogate family ... The relationship between Emily and her emotionally distant mother is particularly well rendered. As for Emily and Jack’s marriage, we soon realise that Emily is in the grip of coercive control. This is done subtly; what Rutkoski doesn’t say is as important as what she does. With great economy she conveys how Emily tiptoes around the threat of Jack’s displeasure, as well as his facility for manipulation as a way of wielding power ... I have heard it remarked of American fiction that too often the protagonists don’t seem to have any friends. This is not the case here: Ordinary Love is replete with friends, and some of the best writing comes in the novel’s exploration of how they try to save Emily from Jack, only for him to isolate her almost completely. Emily’s regret, and her attempts to repair these friendships, are so richly written that they almost overshadow the central romance between Emily and Gen, which despite the various stumbling blocks to happiness is somehow more straightforward, and less nuanced, than these female friendships. Perhaps it is because we see little of Gen’s interior life in comparison with Emily’s ... Ordinary Love never sags. Rutkoski has written a page-turner, and her prose is generally good. However, every few pages there is a turn of phrase or a metaphor that makes my teeth itch ... How much you enjoy this book will depend on your tolerance for this sort of thing. Mine is generally low, but I pressed on. The plot zipped along and the clumsy metaphors seemed to drop off by the second half, I suspect owing to an editor’s guillotine ... One more round of revision in this case would have been no bad thing. Saying that, Ordinary Love is still superior to the vast majority of books in a similar vein, and it has much to recommend it—not least the fact that the sex is very good indeed.
A sexy, bittersweet novel with characters that peel off the page ... The novel, which leaps between the present day and various points in Emily’s life, is tender and finely written. The women’s love for one another—at times hesitant and strained, but ever-present—is central, but Emily’s journey to rescue her autonomy and creativity, and protect her children, is just as stirring. This dialogue-heavy novel burns slow, drawing the reader deep into the protagonist’s interiority and through the emotional turbulence that shakes Emily’s most important relationships as she conjures 'a vision, clear as fact, of what could have been.' By the end, readers will feel they know Emily and Gen backward and forward, and they will almost certainly miss spending time with them.
A raw and moving second-chance love story ... Rutkoski tracks their slow rekindling in stunning prose that skillfully weaves past and present. The result is a brutal yet beautiful story that captures what it means to genuinely support, cherish, and love another person.
