Someone Else’s Love Story

Someone Else’s Love Story is Joshilyn Jackson’s 2013 novel, set primarily in the small town of Lumpkin County, Georgia, and built around a single morning that changes the lives of several characters in ways none of them could have predicted. Shandi Pierce is a single mother of an unusually gifted three year old named Natty, the son she had at twenty after a frat party that she has spent four years not thinking about. On the morning the novel opens, Shandi and Natty are heading to Atlanta to look at apartments. They stop at a Circle K convenience store. The store gets robbed.

The robbery brings Shandi into contact with William Ashe, a quiet, brilliant geneticist whose own life has just been broken open by a tragedy he has not yet found a way to live with. William makes a choice during the robbery that saves Shandi and Natty but that the cost of which will only become clear across the rest of the novel. The two of them, plus Shandi’s lifelong best friend Walcott, end up entangled in the slow unraveling of who Natty’s father actually was, what William is going to do with the wreckage of his own life, and what kind of love story any of them is actually living.

Joshilyn Jackson is one of the strongest contemporary voices in southern fiction. Her prose is sharp without being cold, her dialogue captures the specific rhythms of southern speech without becoming a performance of regional flavor, and her characters are written with the kind of love that lets even the difficult ones be fully present. Someone Else’s Love Story uses rotating perspectives to let the reader see the situation from inside several heads, with William’s chapters in particular giving the novel its emotional weight.

For longtime Joshilyn Jackson fans, this is one of her most accomplished novels. For new readers, it is a strong introduction to her work and a southern novel that earns its tears without manipulating for them. Readers who enjoy Sue Monk Kidd, Joshilyn Jackson’s earlier novels, or Wiley Cash will find familiar territory here.