Book Review | How to Love | Katie Cotugno

Title: How to Love
Author: Katie Cotugno
Genre: Contemporary YA
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Publisher: Balzer + Bray
Release date: October 1, 2013
Source: Borrowed

Summary: Before: Reena Montero has loved Sawyer LeGrande for as long as she can remember: as natural as breathing, as endless as time. But he’s never seemed to notice that Reena even exists…until one day, impossibly, he does. Reena and Sawyer fall in messy, complicated love. But then Sawyer disappears from their humid Florida town without a word, leaving a devastated—and pregnant—Reena behind.

After: Almost three years have passed, and there’s a new love in Reena’s life: her daughter, Hannah. Reena’s gotten used to being without Sawyer, and she’s finally getting the hang of this strange, unexpected life. But just as swiftly and suddenly as he disappeared, Sawyer turns up again. Reena doesn’t want anything to do with him, though she’d be lying if she said Sawyer’s being back wasn’t stirring something in her. After everything that’s happened, can Reena really let herself love Sawyer LeGrande again?

In this breathtaking debut, Katie Cotugno weaves together the story of one couple falling in love—twice.

Books about teenage pregnancy intrigue me. I always wind up reading them to see how one author’s take differs from another, and what other elements they bring for the characters to deal with. Katie Cotugno’s debut, HOW TO LOVE has it’s own spin on teenage pregnancy with a heaping dose of troubled relationship, and the more I think about it, the more my thoughts become a muddle of good and bad. Mostly, though, I enjoyed it quite a bit. But let’s chat, shall we?

So, HOW TO LOVE is, at it’s heart, a story about an effed up young family. Reena and Sawyer were a young, troubled couple. They were in LUURVE for sure, but their teenage romance was marred by Sawyer’s drug problem, which got progressively worse until one day when he up and left and Reena was left all alone with no explanations or goodbyes. And, you know, A BEHBEH IN HER BELLY. Katie Cotugno tells her story in dual-time: Before (meaning the first time Reena and Sawyer were together) and After (present time, when Reena is now raising their baby, Hannah). In After time, Sawyer has returned to discover that Reena still means something to him and that her baby is his baby, and that he has LOTS of splaining to do.

The first thing that grabbed me about HOW TO LOVE–and the thing that made me love it more than anything else–was the writing. Katie Cotugno has the goods, friends. Her writing was lovely and evocative and I found myself wanting to mark up EVERYTHING because it was the kind of writing that made me swoon and feel feelings and say to myself, “YES. I know this feeling.” That’s pretty special, and it’s one of the things I remember about HOW TO LOVE with the most fondness.

Another thing that I really enjoyed about Katie Cotugno’s debut was Reena herself. She struggles with trusting this new Sawyer who has come back into her life and coming to grips with the truth of who he was before. Plus, she TOTALLY still loves him, but also hates him and the fact that he left her and basically treated her like crap a lot of the time when they were together before. I mean, he had a drug problem, and that is a debilitating addiction, and I always got the sense that he didn’t MEAN to be treating Reena badly. But he did anyway, and that kind of rough treatment BURNS, friends. Mostly, though, I loved Reena as a mother. I loved the little scenes with her and Hannah. I loved her little nicknames and the way she seemed to be embracing motherhood even though it’s not easy. BIG FAN of her.

Because I was such a big fan of Reena, I had a hard time always liking Sawyer. I wanted to give him some amount of a pass because addictions are not something that people can control, and I felt like judging his treatment of Reena because of that was a little unfair. So the Before Sawyer wasn’t great, but I could see why Reena was so enamored of him, even if she could’ve been a little smarter about what was going on. And he does something pretty craptastical right before he blows out of town. It was After Sawyer that bothered me more. He had this uncanny ability to be both swoony and a DOUCHE. After Reena is dating a guy, the supremely AWESOME Aaron, and Sawyer clearly has no respect for their relationship or the fact that he’s good for Reena and is great with Hannah. I mean, he wants to make things right with Reena but he still isn’t treating her the best way he can, and he doesn’t have anything (at least in my eyes) like his addiction to blame, as it were. By the end of HOW TO LOVE, I was conflicted about my feelings towards him.

In the end, though, despite my complicated feelings about Sawyer, I was still enchanted with the FEELINGS in Katie Cotugno’s debut, and I’m seriously still so impressed with her writing. It makes me envious! It’s so good! I’ll be reading more of her books for sure. HOW TO LOVE was one of those great books that makes the characters real because they are imperfect, and lovable because they are imperfect. I can’t guarantee that everyone will be as forgiving of Sawyer as I found myself to be, but Reena and her struggles to be a young mother are reason enough to give HOW TO LOVE a go.

Check out some other reviews of How to Love by Katie Cotugno!

April @ Good Books and Good Wine: “READ THIS BOOK.”

Estelle @ Rather Be Reading: “Let’s face it. We don’t always make the right moves in life. There’s a lot of that going around here, and everything felt so real.”

Ashley @ Ashley Loves Books: “There’s friendship love, family love, respect love, tough love, shrouded love…it’s all here, in so may facets, and it’s all wonderful.”