33. Someone Else's Love Story by Joshilyn Jackson

listened on Audible
read by the author in her wonderful, lilting southern style
Unabridged audio (12:03)
2013 William Morrow
320 pgs.
CRF
Finished 3/28/2019
Goodreads rating:  3.66 - 12,164 ratings
My rating: 4
Setting:  Contemporary Atlanta

First line/s:  "I fell in love with William Ashe at gunpoint, in a Circle K."

My comments:  I could listen to Joshilyn Jackson read forever.  The story seemed particularly long and drawn out, but I didn't care because of that.  It's an intricate story that winds in and out and around itself, with its own little histories and pleasures and treasures peeking out every so often.  Many love stories are touched upon in this novel - right down, in a way, to the robber's as well.  told from two points of view, one even allows us a chance to climb inside the brain of someone with Asbergers.  Jackson has written tighter novels, but this is good nonetheless.

Goodreads synopsis:  At twenty-one, Shandi Pierce is juggling finishing college, raising her delightful three-year-old genius son Natty, and keeping the peace between her eternally warring, long-divorced Catholic mother and Jewish father. She’s got enough complications without getting caught in the middle of a stick-up in a gas station mini-mart and falling in love with a great wall of a man named William Ashe, who willingly steps between the armed robber and her son.
          Shandi doesn’t know that her blond god Thor has his own complications. When he looked down the barrel of that gun he believed it was destiny: It’s been one year to the day since a tragic act of physics shattered his universe. But William doesn’t define destiny the way other people do. A brilliant geneticist who believes in science and numbers, destiny to him is about choice.
           Now, he and Shandi are about to meet their so-called destinies head on, in a funny, charming, and poignant novel about science and miracles, secrets and truths, faith and forgiveness,; about a virgin birth, a sacrifice, and a resurrection; about falling in love, and learning that things aren’t always what they seem—or what we hope they will be. It’s a novel about discovering what we want and ultimately finding what we need.