This year, two of my favourite romance authors were slated to release new books with the same central conceit: a second chance romance. Lucky for me, it’s one of my favourite tropes. Unluckily for me, I am very picky about it.
Both books, Tarah DeWitt’s Left of Forever and Liz Tomforde’s Rewind it Back also happened to come out on the same day, so I was comparing the two even before I had either in my hands. Thankfully for me, I enjoyed both of them, but I thought LoF chose a structure that I thought worked much better for a second chance story.
The biggest problem for me in enjoying a second chance romance is too much of a focus in the past timeline and not enough development for the couple in the main timeline. I really enjoyed Rewind it Back. I like that you can see Liz Tomforde’s writing get better and better as the Windy City series went on, and I thought the characters in this latest installment had great development and were interesting people with good chemistry. The storyline, especially in relation to why they broke up in the first place, made a lot of sense to me and the book was well paced with story beats interesting enough (romances can get fairly formulaic) to keep me invested and guessing. All that being said, I wish there was more attention paid to the romance in the present timeline, just like how it was treated in the flashbacks, which I thought were treated with great care and a lot of the writing really shone in those moments rather than the present. I know that a lot of the point of doing this is because their past relationship informs the characters and their interactions in the present day and it can be a convenient way to build character while still progressing the story, but I think in a lot of cases (this book included) that inherent advantage of flashbacks is taken a bit for granted. It wasn’t exactly that I thought the characters rekindled their relationship too quickly, I just don’t think we got a sense of how they changed their understanding of each other as people which, for me at least, is a big part of why I like the trope so much.
On the other hand, LoF decides to forgo the flashbacks almost entirely, at least in the traditional sense. The split timelines are not explored in alternating chapters, in fact, there are no split timelines at all. Everything we find out about Wren and Ellis’s past–how they got together, how they grew alongside each other, and where it all went wrong–are presented to the reader in quick scenes or short paragraphs as one of the characters remembers the years gone by. It’s an efficient and unique (for me at least) way to navigate a second chance romance. It keeps the focus on the present, and the past events that it does delve into are all in the context of how they are affecting the characters in the present.
I really loved this book. I think Tarah DeWitt is quite an underrated romance authors, her character work is impeccable, her books are weirdly funny even while being deeply melancholy, and her writing is both beautiful and a breeze to get through. All in all, I had a great late-May-early-June with these two books and I can’t wait for both of their next works.