Ana Sefer

SPOILER ALERT! I read CMBYN before the movie came out, and was left breathless by it. It was full of beautiful descriptions that matched the characters and moods, it really reeled you in and left you with a genuine feeling of passion, love and understanding. At least personally. Reading the sequel was almost an utter disappointment. The book is of course not completely terrible and would be a good read for someone who hasn't read the first book. But then it would be hard for the person to follow through the whole point of the book which was that Elio and Oliver find each other again. Yet, it seems that André himself lost the point with unnecessary happenings and repetitive characters where even the main ones, compared to CMBYN, suddenly seemed shallow and uninteresting. While I enjoy learning something about Elio's father, I personally didn't feel like his part of the book gave me something about him that I could walk happily away with. Then came Elio and his lover, which I personally found too long with unnecessary details and it only really grabbed my attention when they were solving the mystery of Léon. Oliver's part was too short on the other hand and told me nothing good about his character that would make me like him more or see any kind of development, bad or good, when it came to his personality. The last part of the book I don't even know what to say about. It seems as though the whole point of the book was that Elio and Oliver should find each other and meet again, but the writer lost himself in other characters, whilst also not telling us anything much about those characters, and then ended with about 5 pages of a happy ending that we didn't know how we even came to. I feel like the title of the book and the build up gives us a feeling of "they are going to have a hard time searching for each other and when they find each other, there will be something they need to overcome to be together", but that doesn't happen at all. It seems as though both of them just wasted their life when the whole time they knew where the other person was. All they needed to do was travel. We know Oliver has a family but he never really shows us his struggle with having to leave his wife and boys to pursue happiness. He mentions it in a few short lines that are just very surface level. Personally, I give it 2 stars for a good mystery solving case and the happy ending. Again, I don't completely hate the book, since it does have quite a few philosophical implications and it makes you think from time to time. As a huge fan of the first book, that I have now read 2-3 times, this sequel doesn't give me the sequel feels. The writing has worsened in my opinion and it left me wishing I could've felt more emotions while reading it. I understand that writing a sequel to a summer romance novel can be hard and a pretty high standard to achieve, but knowing how well written the first part was, I think André had the power and knowledge to write an amazing sequel, if only more thought was put into the plotline itself.