Ordinary Love 💜 The book that got me out of my reading slump, and that I wholeheartedly fell in love with. This story illustrates that there is no simple formula for love or an "ordinary" love story, everyone's journey is beautiful and broken and messy in its own way, and it's the nuances that make the stories extraordinary. Ordinary Love focuses on the life and love of Emily, a beautiful Harvard alumni with entitled socialite friends and a rich hedge fund husband, but it wasn't always this way. Emily grew up in a small town, lead a small life, and has never escaped this suffocating onus to make herself small, to shrink herself into the perfect daughter, the small town girl who leaves, the intellectual...the list goes on and on.

Gen led a small life with her, and as teenagers their romance blooms not through declarations, but through shared marigold seeds in whispered library corners and the beautiful silence of track meets. They fell in love. The thing is with love, we've marginalised it into a neat four-letter word, as if it were something containable but in reality it's a kaleidoscope of timing, truth, selfhood and longing. There's a poetic irony in how adolescence, the most emotionally volatile phase of our lives is also when many first fall in love, despite love requiring the very things adolescents tend to lack; stability, self-understanding, and timing. Emily in many ways embodies the chaos and vulnerability of adolescence, she is still searching for who she is, whilst Gen stands firmly in her self, assured in her sexuality and her future, and emotionally steady, not seeking validation from her peers. It's this stark contrast in their stages of self-development, one is still becoming and one has already arrived that ultimately fractures their relationship.

This shrinking act follows Emily into adulthood and is the foundation for which she marries a rich man and embodies the "perfect wife". Her husband Jack gaslights her and masquerades it as devotion, cloaked in the rhetoric of sacrifice. It is under this guise of privilege that she is coerced into stillness, stripped of her ambition and isolated from friends and her autonomy.

Ordinary Love explores the slow, corrosive nature of coercive control in depth, it is unflinching, intimate, and devastatingly real.

Gen’s journey unfolds in tandem, an Olympic athlete who moves through the world with freedom and desire, yet remains tethered to her first love. Gen was Emily’s borrowed light in adolescence, a fearless glow that illuminated the corners of herself she hadn’t yet dared to explore. And years later, when the shadows of silence and submission threatened to consume her, it is Gen’s enduring love that leads Emily towards her truth, awakening the flame that those unbecoming years had buried.

Ordinary Love dismantles love’s clichés, revealing love not as a neatly packaged pursuit of another, but as a revelatory journey inward. This story reminds us that love isn't where we arrive, it's the reflection we meet on the path to who we are becoming, and that's fucking beautiful.

4.75 stars

ARC review

Emily and Gen met as teenagers and fell head over heels for one another. Emily has some struggles with her bisexuality but she knows she has found something worth fighting for with Gen. Pride and adolescent angst see their relationship come to an abrupt end and their fates split.

20 years later, Emily and Gen are both living the dream from the outside looking in. Gen has achieved all her dreams and become an Olympic runner, and Emily is a mother and wife to an affluent man in Manhattan, struggling to remember who she is outside of this dynamic. When Emily’s husband callousness becomes too much and she leaves the home, only to be brought back into Gen’s path and the two are just as drawn to each other as when they were young.

Ordinary Love switches between the past and present so the reader experiences the first love and the second chance simultaneously which was a really great choice. This narrative style is also a phenomenal vessel for Emily and her husband’s story because it begins with a climax that will have some readers asking: how did it get this bad? and then the author takes you on the spiral of controlling behaviour, social isolation and emotional abuse Emily experienced during her marriage.

Gen is a powerhouse who knows what she wants and the two women balance each other out. When Emily is lost, Gen is grounded, and when Gen starts to waver on her life path, Emily comes through when it’s important. At the end of the day, they both need to decide what sacrifices and risks they’re willing to make and if they can overcome a decades-old misunderstanding.

This book feels to real and raw to be fiction, and I think this could bring a lot of hope to queer young people. 🏳️‍🌈

A very personal read. I found Gen's character and her inner (or very much outer) monologue extremely relatable. A lot of piercing 'one liners' in this book. I thought this story was very well written and well paced. The dual timeline was a little jarring/confusing at times but i believe that was more me getting adjusted to the authors writing style. This book was a big ode to the concept of communication which i adored - the entire concept of "not letting stuff go unsaid" was very well done throughout the book.

Overall, a powerful read which i still can't quite put my thoughts together for.

Ordinary Love by Marie Rutkoski
☀️☀️☀️☀️☀️

Holy hell...this book! It is exquisite. Emotional. Tender. Intense. Vast in scope but minute in detail. A treasure.

To summarise the novel as a love story feels trivial - because this is also a story about self-discovery, abuse, friendship, identity, community, bravery - but at its heart, it is a love story. A damn good one that I was hooked on from the first scene together. Emily and Gen are without a doubt each other's person. Life is undeniably complicated for them but they still manage to connect and be within each other's orbit over the years, which means we get so much yearning. My heart! It wasn't prepared for the yearning. Their relationship is handled with maturity and served with so much passion and care.

The non-linear narrative explores Emily's life in high school with Gen, college without her, marriage and motherhood with an abusive partner, the process of separating and divorcing him, and what her life could become after. To fit so much life into 400 pages is impressive, but Rutkoski's prose is lovingly succinct and purposeful in a way that makes the timeline jumps meaningful. She explores the heavier subjects with sensitivity and specificity. Some scenes verged on being meta in ways I didn't expect to enjoy so much. All of the characters felt vividly real and flawed in ways that enhanced the experience.

This is a difficult book, but an important one. I was always excited to pick it back up and keep exploring, keep learning about Emily and Gen a little bit more with every page. My only criticism, though very minor, is that the ending took me a little by surprise, but it did nothing to diminish the uncompromising craft Rutkoski worked through this book. I loved it. I can't wait to read it again one day and discover more the second time around.


"Emily learned, as everyone does, that happiness is often colored by worry or set-aside grief, even in the moment of happiness. It is rarely pure. But what Emily felt that summer, until the end of it, came close. It was the kind of happiness whose only worry is the loss of that happiness."

"People talk about coming of age as if it only happens when you're young, as if entering adulthood means inhabiting a final era with no more moments when you say goodbye to an old life, but that couldn't be true, because she just had."

Ordinary Love follows Emily as she leaves an abusive marriage and begins to reckon with her past, her mistakes, and the kind of future she wants to build for herself and her children. The story weaves between timelines — jumping back to her past relationship with her ex-girlfriend, Gen, as well as to the beginning of her relationship with her husband, Jack.

TW this book deals with coercive control, financial abuse, gaslighting, and physical and emotional abuse.

Rutkoski portrays this abuse with nuance and sensitivity, showing how complex and messy these situations are, especially the heartbreaking reality that many women return to their abuser multiple times, often pushing away friends and family in order to cope. The lens of Jack’s treatment of their children, and how that continues to affect them as they grow older, adds an even deeper emotional weight.

Despite the heavy subject matter, there’s a quiet tenderness at the heart of the book through Emily and Gen’s reconnection. I liked their relationship, but was annoyed by their communication being still a bit bad. A disappointing plot point after so many years apart to think about their original bad communication.

I also hated how the author didn’t give conclusion to Emily and Jack’s separation. After everything we saw unfold, I wanted more closure there.

In general, this was a tender and raw portrayal of making a difficult choice, as well as finding love again. Thanks NetGalley for the ARC!

Marie Rutkoski’s Ordinary Love is anything but ordinary. With elegant, piercing prose and emotional depth, Rutkoski delivers a powerful meditation on desire, heartbreak, and the complicated terrain of relationships—both romantic and familial.

Emily and Gen grow up in the same small town where they are both a little different. Emily teaches herself Ancient Greek and loves the classics whereas Gen is an extraordinary athlete. In the final year of high school they fall in love. Emily has always dreamed of Harvard but Gen is determined not to take on debt. They are frightened to share what they mean to each other. They separate.

When the women reconnect they have a second chance. It’s complex - Emily is extricating herself from a psychologically cruel marriage and Gen is Nike-endorsed famous - but the women still long for each other.

Ordinary love sweeps you along. The writing is lovely and we come to care for Emily and Gen and the people who love them. It’s a book that celebrates honesty, courage and love in all its forms.

Thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for the arc.

I'm struggling to figure out exactly how I feel about Ordinary Love.

On one hand, it's very slow, there are a lot of unnecessary characters, and at times the dialogue between characters is stilted/unrealistic.

On the other hand, I was deeply invested in Emily's story. Her husband's gaslighting and manipulation was so real that I felt squeamish. I felt angry and happy and frustrated with the characters, and a novel that makes you feel so much is surely a well-written book.

Ordinary Love is contemplative and melancholy. I'd recommend it to anyone who doesn't mind a slow read about complex and sometimes infuriating characters.