Georgie, All Along: An Uplifting and Unforgettable Love Story

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Help comes in a form of an old friend fiction notebook which becomes her guide and sort-of-but-not-really a bucket list. These are literally just my personal feelings as an individual who has experienced life in a particular sort of way and responds to books in ways that inevitably shaped by that. I know it’s a simple premise, going home to find yourself and falling for the old school bad boy, but it’s so much more than that, there are so many layers that this story will suck you in and keep you reading till the last page and then leave you bereft when you realise there are no more pages and you have to say goodbye. They were both thinking words like "forever" and "mine" and "infinite" when they had barely even kissed.

Oh, AND this book has one of the funniest MEET-DISASTERS I’ve read in a contemporary romance in a long time! Clayborn’s capable hands the story transcends the trope and becomes something simultaneously deeper and refreshingly different. Levi, in a complicated situation, feels like he doesn't deserve happiness or the love of Georgie, who is chaotic, messy, smart, funny, and beautiful. She takes a break and comes home to her rural hometown due to feeling like huge parts of her are simply “blank”.She didn’t amount to much at school and never had any real ambitions beyond it; but her ability to live completely in the ‘now’, to adapt and to think on her feet proved to be exactly suited to working as a PA to high-powered (and high-maintenance) intensely creative – and often intensely chaotic – people in the entertainment industry. Needless to say, Georgie and Levi are opposites but as the story progresses we see how these two very different people bring about positive changes in each other's lives, ultimately bringing them closer together. Start to finish there was just so much great here and I honestly don't know what else to say about it except : read it. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average.

It made me feel about a million years old but then I asked my 20-year old sister if it’s like cool term I’m unaware of and she said it was “cringey”.Georgie’s best friend from school Bel also just moved back with her husband and is expecting her first child. So here's where I start to fall apart and lose coherence, because I kind of cannot believe how well this book does both of those things. Even as you are swept away, you know Clayborn's hand is safely on the tiller, steering you expertly through the rapids. I have already taken up too many words of this review without talking about the characterization of Georgie and Levi.

I read a review on here that said this book is mostly just character thoughts with little to no plot and I would absolutely agree. There’s things for her to do there, of course: support her best friend, Bel, who is married and pregnant, and has just moved back herself, and housesit her parents plants.But in summary some of the things I loved: both Georgie’s and Levi, with all my heart, the gorgeous, gorgeous writing, the setting, Georgie’s benignly chaotic parents, Georgie’s relationship with her best friend, Bel, which is deeply loving and supportive but also complicated as most long-standing friendships are, the broader cast who are mostly characterised just enough to feel fully-rounded, Levi’s neurotic dog who constantly farts at inopportune moments, the way that, while the book sort of has a villain (or at least an antagonist), the character is never centralised in the lives of the people he’s hurt, the fact that Georgie and Levi’s relationship is simultaneously quiet and breathtakingly romantic, the conclusions Georgie comes to at the end of the book and the book’s broader exploration of its themes and questions. Clayborn ( Love at First) spins a gentle tale of two people who set out to find themselves and stumble into love along the way.

Georgie is a work in progress, she needs time to find herself and with the help of a notebook she wrote as a teenager she hopes to achieve that. Compared to something like, say Love Lettering, which has a more self-consciously artful style, reflecting the way the heroine perceives the world, Georgie, All Along has a deceptive simplicity to it which means it bounces along very readable and very funny (dropping lines like this like they’re nothing: " 'Okay, so,' I finally say, which everyone knows is the agreed-upon code for best friends when one of them is about to drop some kind of bomb. I loved their chemistry, and I appreciated all the ways that Georgie and Levi encouraged each other to open up and made each other feel seen. To pick a point in your life where things went down one path, and imagine what it would be like if you took another. I plodded forward with reading the e-ARC anyway because the idea of passing up a Kate Clayborn novel just isn’t in my DNA.In the process, Georgie meets Levi and proceeds in her teenage rampage with him - including heavy petting and extensive dry-humping on her parents’ couch… I could certainly relate to that - not at 28, though. Gorgeously written, full of complex characters, and friendships as strong as the central romance -- all Clayborn staples.