Love Story by Erich Segal

My group and I decided to take on reading romance genre books. I had just finished the book Love Story by Erich Segal. At first, I was a bit hesitant to read it, expecting it to be like every other story. But once I started, I could never put the book down.The first sentence of this book immediately captured my attention because it wasn't expected at all: "What can you say about a twenty-five-year-old girl who died?" You would have never expected this type of sentence to appear, especially on the first page, considering the fact that the title is called Love Story. I was confused and it triggered all these questions in my head, making me more and more curious of how and why she died. This first sentence proves to be a great starter for the novel because it made me want to read more into it.

The story follows two college students in their senior year: Oliver Barrett IV, a Harvard student who comes from a wealthy family falls in love with Jennifer Cavilleri, a working class Radcliffe student. The plot narrates their life from family to school life. After they graduated from college, they got married and started a whole new life for themselves, learning about themselves and each other. Segal did a great job of keeping his readers interested by creating these realistic characters and events that people can relate to or have been through before. I found it rather strange and a bit rushed when they fell in love with each other. I thought that it would be more romantic. What really interests me though is that Segal took the cliche of a mismatched love story, a poor girl falling in love with a rich boy, and alters it in a way that will touch the reader's hearts.

The novel not only gives us a love story but shows the double meaning of love. Oliver's relationship with Jenny is a love story but Segal doesn't focus on just that. He also portrays Oliver's relationship with his father, how their father to son relationship is strained. But at the end of the book, his father was willing to make amends, telling his son, "Love means never having to say you're sorry". True love is unconditional and carries no judgement; it is pure and eternal. "Never having to say you're sorry" means that you are loved truly for who you are and that before we can give our love to others, we must learn to accept and love ourselves.