Some phone calls arrive at the exact wrong moment — or, depending on how you look at it, the exact right one. In Emily Giffin’s latest novel, that call comes for Billie just hours after she’s said yes to the marriage proposal she’d been quietly hoping for. On the other end is Mick, the boy she loved before she knew what loving someone actually cost, calling for the first time in nearly a decade with news that will not wait.
Billie has spent the years since leaving Wisconsin building a life that looks, from the outside, complete: a thriving medical practice in New York, a steady and devoted partner in Dean, a past she’s mostly stopped mentioning out loud. Giffin splits the novel between that polished present and a rougher, more electric past — the friendships, the first heartbreak, the version of Billie who hadn’t yet learned to protect herself — so that Mick’s call doesn’t just reopen an old wound, it reintroduces an entire self she’d folded away. As Billie boards a plane back to the town and the people she left, the novel asks what she actually owes the life she built versus the one she walked away from.
What Giffin does well here is resist the easy romance-novel math. This isn’t really a story about choosing between two men; it’s a story about grief, obligation, and the particular ache of loving someone you can no longer have in the way you once did. The Wisconsin chapters have a warmth and specificity — small-town friendships, family loyalty, the low hum of unfinished business — that ground the book even when the present-day plotting strains for momentum. Giffin’s prose stays unshowy and confident throughout, which serves the material: this is a book that trusts its characters’ interior lives more than its plot mechanics, and mostly that trust pays off.
Reception so far has been warm without being uniform. A number of readers and critics have pointed to this as some of Giffin’s most emotionally assured work in years, with particular praise for how unflinchingly it handles caretaking and loss rather than treating them as scenery for a love triangle. The more common complaint is that the late-book turn is easy to see coming well before Billie does, and that the romance itself — the thing the marketing leans on hardest — actually takes a back seat for long stretches to grief and family. Readers expecting a breezy love-triangle beach read may find the book heavier and slower than advertised; readers willing to sit with that heaviness tend to come away won over.
Love You More isn’t Giffin’s tightest plot, but it might be her most honest examination of what “moving on” actually requires. It’s a book about the people who shape us before we’re finished becoming ourselves, and about how rarely we get a clean break from them. For readers who want their romance tangled up with real loss, this is a satisfying, occasionally gutting summer read — proof that Giffin, more than a decade into her career, still has new angles on old feelings.
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