"Other Words for Love" by Lorraine Zago Rosenthal

**Spoilers!**

Other Words for Love, by Lorraine Zago Rosenthal, follows Ari, who after earning an inheritance from her Uncle, attends a prestigious Manhattan prep school. She encounters glamorous and rich new people, and even gets Leigh, her new friend. With Leigh comes her enchanting cousins, Delsin and Blake. While Delsin is a smooth, slightly creepy ladies man, Blake is a warm hearted and undeniably handsome. He charms Ari until she falls for him. After blissful weeks of going out, Ari is suddenly broken-up with by Blake-- and left in a heart-broken trance. Why? Ari risked everything for Blake? Was Ari wrong all along about Blake?

This book was kind of good. 

Great way to start a review.

 One thing I don't like is that the blurb is that at the end it says: "were their feelings true love... or something else?" Which immediately makes me think what? What else besides love? It leaves and open topic and readers questioning which blurbs are supposed to do, but in a stupid way. Anyways, after reading the book, you immediately know that it was love, not lust, or something more animal in desire than love that brought Blake and Ari together. 

Ari's struggle with the breakup is justified slightly by how Blake was her 'first love' and everything, I do think Ari was too obsessed with him.  I get it that she thought he was amazing and she really thought he was perfect, but every 'normal girl' (as Ari often says she is) knows that no boy is 'forever', and that you have to get over it. Ari literally could have changed the course of her life because one guy dumped her. She almost became a stay-at-home slouch who would be obsessed with Blake forever. Why would a smart girl like Ari fall so easily into that slump?

One explanation for the possible for this, however, is that Ari was not only enticed by the attractive boy, like Blake, but the lifestyle of his social class in general. They live in high rises, with fancy parties and classy suits, and have cool families and hip moms and go to private schools without needing a scholarship or their dead uncle's inheritance. This glitz and glam life most likely took Ari away from the life of a girl in Queens (or is it Brooklyn?), who has a middle class lifestyle with homely parents and a messed up family life. Also, a little more randomly, I feel like the 1980's setting ending up being less as important as it seemed in the beginning.

This book portrays girls as so weak, and so needy for love if they're not getting it that they will give up all their dreams for a guy. The actions of Ari, even after knowing Blake was just weak and couldn't stand up for himself, were unbelievable. She was lusting after him and crying for a guy who would appear unattractive, I think, to many girls, as he was someone who couldn't hold his ground and make life choices. The book also jumps back and forth around this theme, and shows these two sides with conflicting consistency.

I mean you have Leigh, who, however mistreated by Ari and Blake, was an immature character, and she was scarred by her boyfriends death, yet she didn't understand any of the other characters desire for affection.  The author makes some moments with the characters so relatable, but some moments so awkward that you feel like you have to take a step back from the book to really get what was going on.

I think the relationship between Summer and Ari is very interesting, however, and was one of the more believable and interesting parts of the book. It was a classic 'friends breaking up' type of plot, but that happens in real life all the time, and was relatable. Also, Summer's character, no matter how unbearable, did make the story more interesting for me.

I was about 50/50 with this book, in terms of how much I liked/disliked it. I thought the author kind of spewed out the end and went a little too far into 'the obsession' of Ari with Blake. She made the characters too weak to believe. That bothered me. I like a book with strong characters with believable flaws that I can relate too. I wouldn't whine over a boy for a summer just because he broke up with me. I would probably mostly be angry, as Blake literally ruined Ari's future.