BOOK REVIEW: You Were There Too by Colleen Oakley @OakleyColleen @BerkleyPub @berkleyromance #youweretheretoo

Do you believe that your dreams have meaning? What would you do if you dreamt about someone you don’t know, and then met that person in real life?

In Colleen Oakley’s You Were There Too, a woman meets a man literally from her dreams. But the problem is, she is already married. Heart-wrenching and thought-provoking, You Were There Too brings up the questions of fate and how much choice we bear in the way our lives unfold.

About the Book

Acclaimed author Colleen Oakley delivers a heart-wrenching and unforgettable love story about a woman who must choose between the man she loves and the man fate has chosen for her in a novel that reminds us that the best life is one led by the heart.

Mia Graydon’s life looks picket-fence perfect; she has the house, her loving husband, and dreams of starting a family. But she has other dreams too — unexplained, recurring ones starring the same man. Still, she doesn’t think much of them, until a relocation to small-town Pennsylvania brings her face to face with the stranger she has been dreaming about for years. And this man harbors a jaw-dropping secret of his own—he’s been dreaming of her too.

Determined to understand, Mia and this not-so-stranger search for answers. But when diving into their pasts begins to unravel her life in the present, Mia emerges with a single question—what if?

Reflection

This book is not entirely what I expected—in a good way! With these sorts of stories, I always expect the current relationship to be unhappy, leaving a gap for the new (or in this case, dream) relationship to grab footing and traction. However, life isn’t that simple, and neither is this story. Almost nothing that I expected to happened panned out, and that meant that the book was full of surprises and took a direction I couldn’t have guessed.

Mia’s husband Harrison moved from Philadelphia to a small town a few hours away from the city. Harrison wanted a different pace for work after a tough case at his previous role, and Mia is hoping to heal from the pain of several miscarriages. It’s hard to tell if she and Harrison are even on the same page anymore.

But when Mia sees a man in the grocery store who she has been having dreams about for years, her world is shaken. How can it be? As their lives become intertwined in the small town, and she and Harrison work through their pain over the miscarriages, things get more complicated. What if Mia ended up with the wrong man? What if even a small moment years prior had set her on the wrong course in her life? And is there time to correct it and live the life she may have been meant to live?

A main theme of this book is the notion of fate, and how much we are an agent in choosing our fate. In the case of Mia’s dreams about Oliver, how she chooses to interpret them means a lot. Are they a prediction of the future? Or is she just wanting them to be that and so she is an agent in moving that to fruition? We learn a lot more about both Mia and Oliver’s pasts as well, and I found that to add so much complexity to the story. The small moments they may have intersected without consciously realizing it. And the moments that we can always choose to put weight on or not put weight on—those end up telling us more than assuming everything is random.

The entire ending is so unique and had a lot of really heart-wrenching moments. I was surprised by how emotional this book is! The ending itself is more ambiguous than I thought it would be, and the way everything unfolds is surprising and fitting at the same time. A beautiful story that definitely will make you think!

Thank you to Berkley Publishing for my copy. Opinions are my own.

About the Author

Colleen Oakley’s novels BEFORE I GO and CLOSE ENOUGH TO TOUCH have been named best books by People Magazine, Us Weekly, Library Journal, and Real Simple, and both were long-listed for the Pat Conroy Southern Book Prize. Formerly the editor-in-chief of Women’s Health & Fitness and senior editor of Marie Claire, her articles and essays have been featured in The New York Times, Ladies’ Home Journal, Women’s Health, Redbook, Parade, Marie Claire and Martha Stewart Weddings. She lives in Atlanta with her husband, four kids and the world’s biggest lapdog, Bailey. Her third novel YOU WERE THERE TOO will be published by Berkley/Penguin in January 2020.