If He Had Been with Me: A Heartbreaking Romance of First Love and Loss

Finn and Autumn were the best of friends until middle school. That's when they seemed to grow apart. Finn was with the popular crowd and Autumn was with the not-so-popular crowd. Their moms were still friends and they were still neighbors, so they saw each other most days. Autumn has Jaime now and they have been going out for practically forever. So what if she feels a pang in her chest when she looks at Finn. She's happy with her new friends and her new life...right? Love this book. This will most likely be my favorite for the year. Laura Nowling just gets it. Everything is just completely brilliant in this novel. The characters are totally great and the story is heartbreaking and just so honest. "I want to savour this wonder, this happening of loving a book and reading it for the first time, because the first time is always the best, and I will never read this book for the first time ever again." She also totally gets being a reader. It always draws me into the book when the character is a big reader too. Finn and Autumn were the best characters. I always wanted a friend like Finn. I wanted that kind of easy friendship where the line between two people is blurred. It was devastating to me to see them not together. I could feel the pull in Autumn's chest each time she saw Finn. Even though she was happy with her other friends and Jaime, she wasn't as happy as she could be. Her heart still wanted more. It crazy how such a small little thing could drive people apart without them even realizing why. A simple miscommunication and two lives are left incomplete. It's awful, but I'm sure it happens all the time. Jaime was an okay character. I think I loved Finn too much to really give Jaime a chance. It seemed a little bit mean at times, but nothing too bad. He just wasn't a good fit for Autumn's eccentricity. Their little group seemed to function like any group of friends and they all seemed to work okay together. The only bit that I wasn't crazy about is when we read Autumn's story that she wrote. She was supposedly this really wonderful author, but the story was fairly juvenile. It wasn't bad it was just kind of basic and plain. This book is everything I want my realistic fiction to be. Just beautiful and honest. I knew how it was going to end early one, you kind of know from the first few pages. Regardless, you are still wishing and hoping that the outcome isn't what it seems to be. It was awful in a good way--in a I don't ever want this book to end kind of way. It made me laugh, it made me bawl my eyes out, it made my chest hurt and it made me close the book and immediately want to pick it up and start from the very beginning. It made me feel everything as if it was my own story. First Line: "I wasn't with Finny on that August night, but my imagination has burned the scene in my mind so that it feels like a memory." Favorite Lines: "No one is perfect." "'I think we're supposed to experience as much beauty as we can.'" "The icy wind burns through my gloves and my fingers ache until they fall numb and silent." "I can feel them in my mouth like three smooth pebbles."

It’s emotional, reflective, and it pulls you into that ache of “what if.” The nostalgic tone and the way it captures complicated closeness. It’s very feelings forward, and if you’ve ever had a relationship that lived in the in between, it hits. It also nails that bittersweet, dreamy sadness that makes you want to text someone you haven’t talked to in years. It leans introspective, so if you need plot driven pacing, it may feel slow at points. Some moments also rely on emotional inevitability rather than surprise. A tender, haunting read for fans of emotional coming of age and "what could have been" stories.

"Like all things that have become history, I now feel as if I always knew it, as if all through this story, it had been lurking in the shadows. The story underneath the story." This F'ing book!! It gave me a bad bout of depression laced with a hint of bipolar disorder then hope and ultimately sadness and curiosity...damn unresolved ending...Is she or isn't she??? I moped around the house while reading this book from the very first page and it wasn't until about 90(ish)% done that I started to feel anything other than despair and frustration. The beginning of the book starts off letting us know that a horrible thing will occur. So yeah, we were warned but waiting for it to come to pass was agonizingly slow (and slightly annoying) mainly because I wanted to smack Autumn (the quirky/beautiful MC) throughout the entire book. How blind can someone be to the fact that all your hopes and dreams are not only possible but completely within your grasp if you just get out of your own head and OPEN YOUR EYES??? "Finny, my Finny, kissed me. It was horrible. It was strange and wonderful. It felt like I was watching a meteor shower and did not know if it meant the stars were falling and the sky was breaking apart." The two main characters (Autumn and Finny) are EXTREMELY well formed. They are 3 dimensional, robust and without a doubt savory. Their relationship is exquisitely complex and undeniably beautiful. I manically kept watch on the page count. I wished desperately that I could freeze the moment and live within it a bit longer while simultaneously devouring each page because I just HAD to know what happened next....I read in bed. I read in front of the TV. I read in the bathroom and in the car BUT when I got to the end I cursed this freaking book because it was an unsatisfying (semi) Cliffy :-( Damn book! This heartbreaking, Coming of Age story deftly highlights how subjective our life experiences are. The writing is emotive, the characters and world building are excellently crafted and the sentiment is poignant and tragically beautiful. I think we all can relate to the cast of teens (and the Mothers as well) as they face the horrible truths of Adulthood. There are a host of Coming of Age realizations and each one made me feel like I was welcoming home an old, friendly pain that had slowly become inconspicuous by blending into the background din of Adulthood. Sound dramatic and fatalistic?? It does and this book has enormous amounts of both but the underlying sweet innocence of it all is heartrending and definitely on the sweeter side of bitter-sweet. I picked this book because I wanted to feel something. I wanted to feel something profoundly and this book delivered. My heart is still aching.

*Spoilers* Firstly I can’t remember who raved about this book and recommended it to me but I’d like to give them a piece of my mind. There were so many frustrating things about the sentences and how poorly this book was structured. It’s the worst one by far with this issue. I’ve read to many books to count. The author was all over the place. And no I’m not talking about the time skipping of months going by (I like books like that), which were pretty confusing as one sentence would be early spring and the next paragraph it would be fall. With no spacing or marking to show passing of time like most authors would do. There were very few dates used (more toward the end of the book). Mainly holidays used as markers. The author would go back and forth from present to future to past without any information to what is what. I couldn’t tell what were the main characters thoughts and what were actually memories of her and finny. The actual story I liked though. A few things I think the story could have absolutely done without but that is just personal preference. The whole teenage baby mama situation.. why? It provided nothing. The mention at the end of the book of finny holding the baby? That’s all that side story was meant for. Could have just done without it. I love tragic stories and endings. Of ppl who are meant to be. Who know they love each other, but who don’t communicate and ruin their own chances of happiness. It’s real life and it’s raw. It’s why the show normal people is my favorite. Which this book reminded me a bit of. All the miscommunication the let’s be friends to not being friends to being lovers. It could have been a great story like that one. Until the author said she was pregnant after being hospitalized, after trying to unalive herself after finny died. Why the pregnancy. Why couldn’t she have just died, or better yet lived and turned into the writer she was meant to be. To move on with time and become that writer in that coffee shop. Why must women have to become mothers to somehow have the will to live again? As the story ends with exactly that. She magically now has the will to live now that she has to live to raise a child *eye roll*. Instead of it being tragic or her becoming what she’s meant to be. It ruined the whole story for me. I’m tired of stories ending in pregnancies and being used to make a character have something to live for. The character should have died like finny. It would have been the tragic love story I thought this book was supposed to be. Needless to say I won’t be reading the finny’s perspective book that’s coming out. One last thing I will note, the main character is 100% undiagnosed autistic, it made it worth reading the rest of the book.

this book is seriously SO GOOD. be prepared to cry your eyes out. my life was honestly changed after reading this. appropriate for 13+

If he had been with me by Laura Nowlin - " Like most of my stories, it will end tragically. 3.5/5 It's seemingly an odd feeling when you finish a book you could predict the ending of. I will start by saying that I liked the book. It was a beautiful coming-of-age story that puts you in the mindset of high school kids and leads you to reminisce on the friends you once had and the reasons you went your separate way. However, while this book has several good parts that I will mention, it also has some parts that deter me from singing its praises. We'll start with the veggies. I couldn't believe how in denial Autumn was about her feelings for Finny. I mean I get that he's a popular boy now and it's an insecure thing to wonder why an attractive boy is into you but she knew him way before that. She'd known him since birth, long enough to know what his facial expressions and body language meant but she couldn't pick up that he liked her or even that he missed her. Another thing I disliked was the predictability of everything. From the second something was said you could picture the outcome. For instance, when Autumn said she and Sasha fought over Jamie in the beginning, as soon as Sasha broke up with her boyfriend and started hanging out with Jamie alone you knew what was going to happen. Also, as soon as her friend mentioned having unprotected sex you knew she was going to get pregnant which ruined the ending of the cycle continuing when Autumn has unprotected sex. Now for the desert. I loved that the story was told from Autumn's point of view and I believe one of the most realistic feelings this book portrays is the relationship of Autumn's parents. As a teenager, you tend to ignore the adults around you because they don't understand you and you would never want their life and you get that from Autumn. She sees her absent father and knows not to depend on him or expect him to know why she wears tiaras or how she expresses herself. She looks at her mother and doesn't want to become her or exhibit the depressive episodes that she witnesses her mother go through. But in the end, when she loses Finny we see her become her mother and we get a glimpse of it when she goes through seasonal depression. Overall, this book is a good read. After all, I couldn't put it down. It reminded me of what I was like as a teenager in some ways, the group of friends you'd never thought you'd lose until everyone's life changed. I also related to her relationship with her parents. There's so much to hold onto when reading this book. I just wish I didn't see the most shocking parts of the book coming. I wish I could've been surprised when Jamie cheated, her parents divorced, Finny confessed his love, when he died, her suicide attempt, and when she found out she was pregnant. Or maybe I wish he'd been with her. Favorite Quotes: • I've loved him my whole life, and somewhere along the way, that love didn't change but grew. It grew to fill the parts of me that I did not have when I was a child. It grew with every new longing of my body and desire until there was not a piece of me that did not love him. And when I look at him, there is no other feeling in me. • Stay I whisper to him. Stay in the car. Stay in this moment. But of course he never does. • Perhaps he would ask me what books mean to me. I would tell him that it means living another life; • They don’t see that her tension and perfection are the only things holding her together. • I cannot imagine not wanting to live. I cannot imagine not believing that it will be better someday. I cannot imagine that there is nothing left to see, that there is nothing to tie me to Earth. As long as I want to live, then I must be fine. • If he had been with me, everything would have been different. Favorite Characters: Finny, Autumn, Aunt Angelina, Angie, Alex, Jack

If you’re looking for a depressingly beautiful romance, this is a good read. I fell in love with the characters immediately, which made the ending so much more heartbreaking. The sentences: “Late in the night, I hear footsteps in the hallway. I roll over and look at the door. It opens slowly. “Finny?” I say. There is silence. “Oh, Autumn,” my mother says.” really hit different. My sister read it first and did spoil the ending for me, but I still loved reading, though I did hate the ending. It was integral to the story, but it was painful. I didn’t like reading for a while, but as soon as I read this book, I didn’t ever want it to end. The story really was beautiful and well written, so I fell in love with the characters. That’s what made the ending break my heart. I wish I could read it for the first time again. This book was amazing. ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Loved this book

O livro é lindo e perfeito! Chegou antes do prazo. Ele é revestido em tecido, as impressões de arte são espetaculares, a pintura trilateral com a frase é de uma beleza sem igual. Eu amo tanto a história desse livro.

The miscommunication in this book was something else. I hated it and I loved it! The real eye opening part was how we all have our own version of events and we never really see the same things. I loved everything about this book except Jamie. Hated his guts and I’m so so glad he never ended up with autumn. Hated Sasha to how could she do that her best friend. I loved autumn and finny and my poor heart was broken by the end of this book. I wanted her to be with him and when it was happening I was cheering from the rooftops. The last page of this book tho had me screaming. How could it end just like that! I immediately brought both books in paper back and I can’t wait to read book 2. This book was everything I never knew I needed to read. I hope future readers feel the same too

Loved it. Do not recommend. One of the first books I ever cried for.

REVIEW IN ENGLISH AND FRENCH 🇬🇧 English review : This book completely destroyed me! The ending takes your heart with such surprise, for 400 pages you become attached to Autumn and Finny as if you've known them forever. We see their relationship evolve over the years, the highs and the lows. An unspoken love story that will break you to the very last word. Tip: read with a sad playlist for more emotion! Definitely one of my favourite books!This book completely destroyed me! The ending takes your heart with such surprise, for 400 pages you become attached to Autumn and Finny as if you've known them forever. We see their relationship evolve over the years, the highs and the lows. An unspoken love story that will break you to the very last word. Tip: read with a sad playlist for more emotion! Definitely one of my favourite books! ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ STARS 🇫🇷 French review : Ce livre m'a complètement détruite ! La fin vous prends le coeur avec tellement de surprise, pendant 400 pages on s'attache à Autumn et à Finny comme si on les connaissaient depuis toujours. On voit leur relation évoluer au fil des années, les hauts comme les bas. Une histoire d'amour non dite jusqu'au dernières pages qui vous briseront jusqu'au dernier mot. Conseil : à lire avec une playlist triste pour plus d'émotions ! Définitivement un de mes livres préférés ! ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ ÉTOILES

I loved the book and it didn’t come damaged or anything but it came from Bangladesh which is probably why it took a while to arrive. But fully recommend the book!