Emily has, by all appearances, a beautiful life: a townhouse on Manhattan's Upper East Side, two healthy children, and a husband who showers her with attention. But the truth is more complicated: Emily's marriage is in trouble, her relationship with her parents is fraught, and she is still nursing a heartbreak from long ago. When Emily runs into her high school best friend Gen at a cocktail party, that heartbreak comes roaring back. But Gen Hall is no longer the lanky, hungry kid with holes in her shoes who Emily loved in her youth. Instead, Gen is now a prominent Olympic athlete with sponsorship deals and a string of high-profile ex-girlfriends. Emily and Gen circle one another cautiously, both drawn together by a magnetic attraction and scarred by their shared history.
The sex scenes in Ordinary Love are some of the best I have read this year ... It is in her exploration of the intricacies of family, as well as romantic relationships, that Rutkoski is at her most impressive ... The relationship between Emily and her emotionally distant mother is particularly well rendered ... Subtle ... Emily’s...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.
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.
Fascinating, stomach-curdling ... Initially, the second half of the book, which consists of this rekindling of the relationship between Emily and her first love from high school, Gen, is excellently done. It’s everything a romance novel (because no matter how many allusions to the Greeks and Harvard you put in, this is, like so much “literary fiction” marketed today, a good, old-fashioned romance novel) ought to be; thrilling, heart-wrenching and genuinely arousing. The sex scenes between Gen and Emily are gorgeously written, graphic without being seedy, detailed without the detail feeling gratuitous ... Alas, as soon as this relationship starts to enter the Ross-and-Rachel-esque second and third rounds of well-intentioned misunderstandings and innocent untruths, one’s patience grows thin. I get the impression, from the somewhat cliched meta-narrative in the book, in which Emily’s new agent tells her that her book’s ending needs to be padded out, that perhaps there was pressure on Rutkoski to do the same. If so, they’ve done her a disservice ... The protracted romantic tension is irritating rather than exciting. Also, unfortunately, the cast of spunky, ever-understanding friends that pop up here and there are almost too annoying to be borne, and one senses through them Rutkoski’s history as a writer of YA and children’s fiction. Even so, many readers are desperately seeking accounts of spunky friends and the vicarious comfort of lovers’ turmoil, and this novel will no doubt be adored by them.
