Review | The Look of Love by Sarah Jio

The Look of Love by Sarah Jio
Published by Plume
Publish Date: November 25, 2014
Source: Book – Library, Audiobook – Library
Find It: Goodreads / Amazon 

Born during a Christmas blizzard, Jane Williams receives a rare gift: the ability to see true love. Jane has emerged from an ailing childhood a lonely, hopeless romantic when, on her twenty-ninth birthday, a mysterious greeting card arrives, specifying that Jane must identify the six types of love before the full moon following her thirtieth birthday, or face grave consequences. When Jane falls for a science writer who doesn’t believe in love, she fears that her fate is sealed. Inspired by the classic song, The Look of Love is utterly enchanting.  (Goodreads)

My Thoughts:  The Look of Love is my first book by Author Sarah Jio, chosen because I wanted to listen to an audiobook while I did some work around the house and this one was available in my library’s digital stacks. Also! My friend Jamie has recommended this author to me before and I haven’t read her books yet. (She actually recommended Blackberry Winter by Sarah Jio, but that book was not available at the time. Soon, Jamie!)


Briefly: Jane Williams has just found out that she has an interesting gift: the ability to “see” when two people love one another. Her vision actually changes to a blurry, cloudy sort of thing and that’s how she knows there is real love there. Jane has been given the task of identifying six types of love and writing about them in a journal before her thirtieth birthday. Failure to do this means that she will never find her own true love. 


Once Jane realizes she has this gift, she also realizes that she’s been seeing people love one another for a very long time without realizing it. 

The Look of Love is basically the examination of Jane’s circle of friends and their romantic lives…except through Jane’s eyes, which is like looking through love-colored glasses, if you can imagine such a thing. Sometimes I laughed, sometimes I smiled, and sometimes my heart broke as pieces of the intertwining stories were revealed. In this book, not everyone ends up with the all-encompassing, dramatic type of love like we seen in the movies, but that’s okay. 


I loved the heartwarming tales of people finding true love. Who doesn’t love stories like that? My heart broke a couple of times, too. Some of the stories that did not end up like I wanted them to, or maybe didn’t take the course that I expected. Such is the way of life and love, and I think that is why I enjoyed this book so much. I loved the mixture and community of these people with different life experiences, how they were all connected, and how they all experienced differing types of the same emotion. 


I really just think that this was a case of the right book at the right time for me, and I love when that happens. This book felt like a good cup of coffee and a warm blanket. I’d love to read it again without the audiobook, perhaps in paperback format. I’d love to hold the story in my hand. Does that sound weird? Maybe. In any case, this is a perfect combination of magical realism and contemporary-not too much, but perfect. This might have been my first book by Sarah Jio but already I’ve found myself looking at my digital library for more of her backlist.


I recommend The Look of Love by Sarah Jio to readers that enjoy adult contemporary fiction with romance and a touch of magical realism.