Content warning: Grief and loss, neglectful parents

Love at First is a contemporary romance about community and healing from grief, and what makes a home and a family. The story centres around a block of apartments in Chicago, and its two newest residents. Nora inherited her apartment from her Nonna about a year ago, but having spent all her summers there as a child, she views it with the affection of a resident of more than twenty years. She loves the apartment and the community, from its awful velvet wallpaper to the monthly poetry nights, and for her, the other residents have always felt like family.

Will inherited his apartment still more recently, from his estranged Uncle Donny, and for him, it comes with no fond memories. In fact, Will doesn’t want to think about Donny, or his family, at all, and would like to get rid of the apartment as soon as possible. But the terms of Donny’s Will forbid him from selling for at least 12 months, so in the meantime he decides to fix up the apartment and rent it out as short-term accommodation.

This, of course, puts him at odds with Nora and her fellow apartment owners, who fear that short term tenants will break the sense of community they have so carefully nurtured. And so Nora engages on a campaign to kill Will with kindness, or, if necessary, by any other means available to her.

I found the first part of this story incredibly difficult to read. It started gently, with a prologue, in which child Will hears Nora’s voice from the balcony and is instantly drawn to her; and a first chapter, in which the adult Nora and Will meet by chance on their balconies before dawn, and have this quiet, tender connection to each other. I was lulled into an expectation of sweetness, which was immediately dashed in the next chapter, when we learn of Will’s plans for the apartment block.

For me, Nora and her neighbours’ concerns about what will happen to their block and their community if the sixth apartment becomes an AirBNB, locked straight in to some of my very best insecurities. Your home should be the place where you feel safe and secure – but what if it changes, in ways you can’t control? And of course, this is an experience common to many people, whether that change is new and difficult neighbours, or suddenly being informed your lease is ending and you have four weeks to find a new place to live. Gah. I’m feeling stressed out just thinking about it! The fact that Nora’s needs and Will’s were so directly and irreconcilably at odds really stressed me out, too, especially because that first meeting between them really was so sweet and showed how much they immediately liked and were attracted to each other. I didn’t want to see them becoming enemies.

Also…I have feelings about the ethics of the whole AirBNB-style system, and the way that short term rental apartments can drive up rental costs for people who need a place to live, not just a place to holiday. In Will’s case, the plan quickly evolves into renting out the apartment to junior doctors on rotation, who will often be at one hospital for 2-4 months. And clearly there is a need for this sort of accommodation, and it’s not like Will plans to buy and rent out multiple apartments – he just happened to inherit this one. But it also felt to me a bit like ducking the question of whether it’s really OK to play monopoly with actual houses in the current economy. And it made me inclined to dislike Will from the start. It didn’t help that Will is someone who has learned very early to avoid making emotional connections with people, and he uses charm to keep people at arm’s length…which made it hard for me to trust him.

Fortunately, at about the 35% mark, a mother cat gave birth to a litter of kittens in Will’s wardrobe. Their sabotage of his renovation attempts improved things markedly from that point (Proof, if you like, that everything is better with kittens.) From that point on, while Nora and Will still seemed to have irreconcilable goals, they also began to develop a friendship, which quickly developed benefits (some of these benefits involved the installation of bathroom fittings) (not a euphemism) (though, really, it should be) and it was much easier going.

The relationship between Will and Nora is an interesting one. They have an instant and strong attraction to each other, both physical and emotional. Really, this is the quintessential example of ‘I hate him / I can’t stand her, why can’t I stop thinking about his/her hair?’ (Truly, they do think a lot about each other’s hair.) And in the early parts of the book, when they are enemies, they both find it hard to stop liking each other. Will is exasperated but also kind of impressed by Nora’s creative sabotage of his plans; Nora is infuriated by, but reluctantly respectful of, how well Will handles the neighbours. And while they are definitely devoted to undermining each other’s plans, neither of them will stoop to being deliberately hurtful – they keep having inadvertent moments of connection and understanding, and then being horrified with themselves.

Once they admit to liking each other, the relationship they build is friendly and sexy, but also marked by poor communication. Will is of the breed of hero who Must Never Fall In Love, and while he has better reasons for it than some, this makes him blow hot and cold, and not in a sexy way. Nora, on the other hand, despite placing a high value on emotional connections, is also very insecure and avoidant of change. And falling in love with someone is a pretty big change. While these issues are somewhat resolved by the end of the book, and I believed in the happy ever after, I did feel like both of them could have benefited from a bit of therapy.

If I was not always sold on the strength of Nora and Will’s relationship, there were two other relationships in this book which I utterly adored. You see, Will has a boss who is not very easy to get to know:

He was five foot six of fifty-six-year-old dead seriousness, with an encyclopedic knowledge of hospital policy and absolutely zero sense of humor.

Dr Abrahams is an excellent doctor, with a rather relentless attention to detail, but not much of a bedside manner. But he takes his mentorship of Will very seriously. He introduces Will to Sally, his free-spirited ex-wife, who owns several short term rentals, suggesting that she might be able to help him figure out what to do with the apartment. I was fearing some sort of messy and professionally disastrous love triangle, but no. Dr Abrahams, it seems, thinks that Will, being handsome and charming and all, must clearly have a way with women, and thus might be able to advise him on winning back his ex-wife. Perhaps by buying her another kitten? She seems to like the ones she adopted from Will…?

(Will may not be the ladies’ man Abrahams thinks he is, but he does, at least, have enough sense to advise Abrahams against the acquisition of more kittens.)

The glimpses we get of this little secondary second-chance relationship between Dr Abrahams and Sally is absolutely adorable. He is working *so hard* to get it right this time. He approaches the broken relationship as if it were a broken limb: one diagnoses the problem, and treats it in a logical and evidence-based manner. And his attempts to be a little less rigid, and Sally’s to be a bit more tolerant of his quirks are super sweet and I was there for them.

But even that pales before my favourite relationship in the entire book, which is the one between Will and Dr Abrahams. They are both really quite bad at relationships, in very different ways. Will uses charm to deflect any sort of closeness, whereas Dr Abrahams actually does want emotional connections with people. He’s just really bad at expressing himself. And they bumble around being all awkward and emotionally stunted but also trying very hard to be good colleagues, and eventually accidentally stumble into being best friends, and actually helping each other out quite a lot, and I squeeed with the cuteness of it all.

I also really loved the little community in the apartment block, and I especially enjoyed their weaponised neighbourliness early in the book. Will’s attempts to tidy up the apartment and get out are sabotaged by the aggressive delivery of casseroles and shortbread, visits to return repaired appliances and house plants, and gifts of home-brewed beer that come with extensive explanations of the brewing process. He is dragooned into the poetry night, and when the kittens turn up, every single neighbour makes a point of coming to help. On reflection, I would probably run screaming if I moved in somewhere and people behaved like that, but it’s definitely fun to read about.

Love At First is a complicated book to define. While it has some really brilliant moments of humour, and certainly had me smiling sappily by the end of the story, the early part of the book was not easy reading for me. I was feeling a bit fragile when I started it, and wound up setting the story aside for a couple of weeks, because I was finding the conflict so upsetting. When I did come back to it, I wound up loving it, but yeah. That first quarter or so was hard. I wouldn’t recommend starting this book on a day when you are feeling down. And there is a lot of grief and I might even say repressed trauma in this book. Both Will and Nora have been heavily affected by their childhoods, and while they do manage to push themselves up from under those boulders during the book, it’s not an easy process.

I’m giving this a B. On the one hand, I couldn’t bear to pick it up for two weeks. On the other hand, it had me squeeing and cooing and smiling like a besotted thing at the end. I also want to note that the title of this book is very clever, and its meaning changes over the course of the book in ways that add to the charm and emotional resonance. Love at First is a beautiful book and worth the painful beginnings – but if you’re feeling fragile, too, maybe proceed with caution.