If He Had Been With Me by Laura Nowlin (review)

Finn and Autumn grew up next door to each other, with families that shared holidays, vacations, and weeknight dinners. They began to grow apart in junior high; then, in high school, they separated further as Autumn rejected the cheerleading set for an emo crowd in high school while Finn’s athlete status kept him with the popular kids, and they got the boyfriend and girlfriend that was expected of them. Despite the fact that Autumn really does love her boyfriend, Jamie, she never stops thinking about Finn, and she finally has to admit that while she loves them both, her revised lifestyle plans, which include a stable, ordinary life rather than the freewheeling writer’s existence she had envisioned with Finn, fit better with Jamie at her side. Autumn’s struggle to be practical about relationships rather than succumbing to a more romantic view of a consistent depth of passionate attachment is at the same time realistic and disappointing; her feelings for Jamie ebb and flow and that seems normal to her, given the pattern of her parents’ relationship and her bouts of seasonal depression. All the same, she clearly communicates the value of Finn, whose consistent love for her never wavered, even if she only now realizes it. This is a retrospective, however, written after Finn’s tragic death, and it is therefore threaded through with melancholic a longing as Autumn considers how things might have turned out differently had she had the courage to accept the love Finn offered. Finn is, of course, too perfect, as all dead soulmates must be, and their romance is Shakespeare-worthy in its tragic dimension. Autumn’s reflections on love’s possibilities and near-misses will surely resonate with the unsettled teen soul, and readers will get exactly what they came for, and then some.