Clara and Benjamin have a chance meeting at a night club during their college years. What feels like a “meant to be” relationship takes a tragic turn and forces them apart. As their love story unfolds, and the years since they’ve been together tick away, a tragedy brings up old feelings and they find themselves reflecting on what could have been. Following several time jumps, and back and forth, the story unwinds and secrets come out as Clara and Benjamin’s love story goes back and forth through college and adulthood.

Honestly, I am trying to decide what to say about this novel besides it is one of the most depressing books I have ever read. The main characters, Clara and Benjamin, have too many problems to enumerate. This young love is fraught with persona; problems and there just does not seem to be any depth to it. The best part of the book is the ending.
I voluntarily read and reviewed an advanced copy of this book. All thoughts and opinions are my own.

This book has moving timelines and jumps back and forth. This added to the suspense and made me want to keep reading as I needed to know what happened. I really enjoyed this book.

In the present day, Clara, a journalist hears about a bombing at a Newcastle football stadium, this takes her back to 20 years ago when she met Benjamin at university in the city. The novel moves backwards and forwards between the two time periods and the intervening years and we discover how they met and ultimately what separated them 20 years ago.
The One That Got Away is beautifully written, it's an emotional and compelling read which covers serious issues which I felt the author approached with sensitivity, and it never felt that these issues were being forced into the plot.
The author has a real skill of empathically showing how we come to relationships in our teens and 20s with many of our own issues, traumas, hopes and fears. I felt that I could relate to the anxieties of both the younger Clara and Benjamin, and this helped me to have compassion for my younger self.
This is not a traditional rom com, it's an emotional read but ultimately hopeful and uplifting.
Highly recommended.
Many thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the opportunity to read and review this digital ARC.
4.5 stars.

This was a really good book. My thoughts are included in the attached link to my goodreads. Dual timelines can be hit or miss, and this was a hit. it worked so well

This ARC was provided to me via Kindle, from Aria & Aries and #NetGalley. Thank you for the opportunity to preview and review. Opinions expressed are completely my own.

Twenty years after you lose the love of your life and you still lol for them.

I never found myself rooting for Clara and Benjamin to get together. Their romance felt forced, and the chemistry between them was lacking.

As well as this, there's quite a lot happening in the book. It almost feels like an Issues Book.

It just wasn't for me.

The characters that the author describe can be your friend, a family member or even yourself. You can identify with her or with him.
Sometimes I felt that I was going too fast because of how things went by, but maybe the writer wanted us to feel how quickly time passes

What a beautiful book! The story was so well written and the characters seem so real! It was so exciting and I was desperate to read more at the end of every page. I really enjoyed the different POVs and timelines and how they added so well to this amazing book! I was so intrigued for the plot twist and it was absolutely incredible! Can’t recommend this book enough! I loved every second of it!

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for giving me a copy of this book to review. My opinions are my own.

Trigger warnings include: suicide bombing, child abuse, anxiety, infertility, manslaughter, death of a elderly parent and a parent walking out on their young son.

I thought this book was going to be a straight forward second chance romance but it was very heavy. Clara and Benjamin weren't very likeable and I felt that their relationship was a disaster and they should have moved on from it years ago. It took too long to reveal why they originally split up and by then I did not care about any of the characters.

Clara and Benjamin come from very different worlds,yet find themselves enmeshed in a tragic love story. We follow them through college in this dual timeline which also sees them 20 years on in their very different but similarly unhappy lives. Thought-provoking and with heavy topics weaved throughout, I found this an intense but enjoyable read.

Thank you to NetGalley and Aria & Aries for providing an arc. The One That Got Away is available on February 2, 2023.

This book was everything I wanted it to be. It had me turned pages without even realizing. It was so good!

I'm going to start this review off by saying that I had to force myself to finish this book. If it wasn't an ARC I would've stopped at around 20%.

Going into this, this is what I understood of the plot:
- a guy and a girl meet in uni, fall in love
- something happens, and they don't talk for years
- fast forward, they rekindle and happy ending for them

There are heavy topics thrown in (solely for impact imo). TW: alcoholism, assault, self-harm, terminal illness, child sexual abuse, sexual assault, death of a parent, infertility and cheating. As I said before, it sounded like a light-hearted story, but boy was I surprised when she out of nowhere describe in detail how she'd self-harm. Also, the ending is random and I hate open endings.

The story spans 20 odd years of the main characters' lives, but they meet when they are 18/19. Everything Benjamin did, Clara overthought to the extreme. All the problems the two had were because of her. Any one of them, you can trace back to her.

Benjamin, although sometimes badly, tried his best to communicate. She always assumer the worst. Benjamin deserves better. She's selfish, rude, dumb, whiney, irrational, and impulsive... I could go on. And even in her 40s, she has not matured.

For a book advertised as a romance, there was literally none to be found. The main characters had no chemistry, they kept saying they were soulmates, but they just felt like dumb naive teenagers in their first relationship.

Overall, not for me, at all. If you enjoy books spanning a large portion of the characters lives and an open ending, this might be for you.

I loved this book, I often think that writing in two different timelines in the same book must be difficult but this book does it fantastically well, it is so well written and I didn't want to stop reading because I wanted to know what happened! A book I will definitely be recommending, it is brilliant.

The One That Got Away is a bit of a miss for me. I liked the dual timeline, but I guess I didn’t read the trigger warnings well enough. I was expecting a light, fun romance based off the description and the cover, and this book was much darker. It just wasn’t for me!

What a compelling book!

I loved the dual timeline and also the dual narrative. It really played into those misunderstandings and miscommunications of first love. The needy feelings and anxious worry of wondering if the other person feels the same way. Embarrassingly hard relate to that!

A rich, dark exploration into first and enduring love and the consequences of the choices we make.
A cracking page turner too!

Thank you to NetGalley, Aria and to Charlotte Rixon for the opportunity to read this advanced copy.

Dnf
I struggled to connect to the characters/plot.
It has very heavy subjects, please check trigger warnings.
It just didn't vibe with me, which was disappointing as I was really looking forward to it.

Thankyou for the advanced copy

I received this ebook via NetGalley in exchange for a honest review and I would start by thanking everyone involved in allowing me early access.

This was so good I don’t even know where to start! It’s romance but somethings are somehow far from my comfort zone reading wise, but it was such a good reading experience.

For starters, I would like to thank the publisher for the kind e-mail. When we are accepted for a NetGalley book, we received an e-mail saying the book is available on the platform and, in this case, this e-mail said which are the trigger warnings for this book. I found this information fundamental and it improved my reading experience. I tend to prefer cute stories without major TWs, but I can also appreciate a heavier narrative if I’m aware of where I’m getting myself into. This e-mail allowed me to pick up this book at a time when I was mentally available for this narrative and for this I want to give major applause to the publisher. The cover is the cutest thing and maybe, without this e-mail, I would not be in the right mindset to fully appreciate this narrative.

TW: mental health issues, particularly self harm, sexual trauma, suicide bombing.

“The one that got away” as the title indicates, tells us the story of a girl and a boy who were in love but drifted apart. Benjamin was, for Clara, the one that got away.

We get a dual point of view, which I’m a major fan, and a multiple timeline. Both these aspects work wonders and are extremely well made, keeping the reader interesting until the end. The chapters are short, which also adds to this interest as readers, as we are frequently changing and getting to know the characters.

The story is extremely slow paced as far as romance is concern, which is something I don’t tend to appreciate but I really did appreciate here. I can’t exactly pin point what worked wonders for me, but something did. We get to know the characters individually and see how they change due to the relationship. The story is much more character driven rather than action driven and it made perfect sense. There’s a lot of character development and I was living for it! They only get together closer to the end but by then we are so connected with each one of the MCs individually that we can’t put the book down. Maybe this is the magic of the book, we see them as individual people rather than part of a couple and we root for the happiness of both of them, either with each other or with other people.

The last pages, my god! The developments were unexpected, which I also appreciate. I don’t really like predictable endings. I was so invested in this story, I was literally reading and brushing my teeth to go to work. I totally recommend this book, it’s so good I feel I don’t have enough words to express how it caught me from the start till the end, how invested I was with these characters!

This review will also be available on my Goodreads profile and, later on, on y instagram account - @cat.literary.world

A beautiful, gut-wrenching portrayal of lost opportunities, second chances and how our own experiences, traumas, challenges shape the decisions we make. A novel for the vast majority of us who will find themselves at least once reaching cross roads in our lives. This wasn't a traditional rom com, It had much more depth and rawness, but I adored it. Huge congrats!

Thanks to Aria & Aries and NetGalley for the advanced readers copy.

This book feels like a bait and switch. Between the title, cover and the blurb, I was expecting a light, second chance romance. What we get is a book full of heavy subjects with no warning. I'm not sure if I would have enjoyed the book more had my expectations been managed better.