“We believe in love because we want to believe in it. Because really what else is there, amid all our glorious follies and urges and weaknesses and stumbles? The magic, the hope, the gorgeous idea of it.”
–Tara Conklin, The Last Romantics
This past weekend I devoured the new novel The Last Romantics from Friday night until late Sunday. Quite frankly, I didn’t want to put it down. Tara Conklin does a masterful job of drawing us into the lives of four siblings, weaving a story I found both arresting and vividly meaningful.
Spanning from their childhood in the early 1980s through to a slightly dystopian 2079, the Skinner siblings deal with the sudden death of their father, their mother’s depression that follows they call only “the Pause,” and the lives they lead in the years that follow. Conklin deftly explores what love means, and loyalty — how family ties bind and break, pull and twist us into the people we become. Romantic love is peppered into the narrative, but the overarching theme is familial love, how it shapes us, and the heaviness and the light which it carries.
Conklin’s writing reminds me of Barbara Kingsolver by way of Lauren Groff, yet with her own voice and style that make for a deeply engaging novel, one that resonated with me long after I turned the last page. A rich, rewarding read.
Pink&GreenMusings 
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