There are not many books that draw me in so easily, so willingly. It tends to take me a few chapters to really feel immersed in a book. This was not so with Lorraine Zago Rosenthal’s ‘Other Words for Love’. The characters and surrounding world that she created for them were so vivid that I felt as though I could be there myself from the very first page. The story revolves around Ari Mitchell, who starts off the novel nearing her junior year in high school. Her best friend, Summer, is happy to be there for Ari, even though she left their Brooklyn high school to attend Hollister, a prestigious Manhattan high school. When Ari gains the opportunity to also attend Hollister, one would think that life would be great for two best friends who can once again be together. Predictably, however (but not in a bad way), Summer doesn’t take too well to Ari being there, owing mainly to the fact that Ari quickly made a new friend, Leigh, who is not Summer’s definition of the “right type of people.” Summer warns Ari of Leigh’s past – how she killed her boyfriend, how she’s a drunk, etc. – but Ari goes on being friends with her, learning truths about Leigh and Summer all the while. When Ari becomes enveloped in a relationship with Leigh’s cousin Blake, after having harbored a short, but meaningful crush on his brother, Del, things become more complicated than Ari could have ever thought they would.

I thought that Ari’s family was well-written. It was intriguing to see how she handled her crush on her brother-in-law Patrick (her sister Evelyn’s husband). Watching how she dealt with that made her journey in terms of how she interacted with Blake come full circle. Patrick was there for her at the beginning and end to make her see what she really wanted in terms of a man, but she just had to do her utmost to find that in someone else. Maybe she’d find it in Blake, and maybe she wouldn’t, but as the novel went on, she learned about herself, progressing through her last two years of high school and first couple years of college with certain levels of uncertainty, anger, depression, and eventually faith. Despite the way her relationships gained traction and then stumbled, everything she goes through in the novel brings her to a satisfying conclusion for herself and how she plans to look back on life and find strength in it in terms of moving forward, no matter the ending she had at the end.

You can find Lorraine Zago Rosenthal’s ‘Other Words for Love’ here: http://amzn.to/1DmICWd