Stacy Alesi's BookBitch.com™

When publicists send me info on their upcoming books, they generally send along blurbs from other authors and media sites. Occasionally, if publication is pending, I will also get snippets of reviews. This was the blurb that moved this book into my “Read Next” folder: “Fans of The Time Traveler’s Wife will be blown away by Madeleine Henry’s The Love Proof. Told across decades, the book tells the story of physicist Sophie Jones’s quest to prove true love not only exists, but that soulmates will find each other in every iteration of reality.” —PopSugar

I loved The Time Traveler’s Wife. I loved it so much I read it more than once, I facilitated a book discussion on it, and I refused to watch the film for a very long time. This book is not that, not by any stretch of the imagination. Yes, it pretty much revolved around time but not really time travel, and that is a huge difference. Also, I found myself skimming it quite a bit as theories of mathematics and physics filled the pages, or at least I assume that’s what that stuff was, as I said, I didn’t read it all that carefully because I didn’t care. When I returned to college to finish my degree after being away for over twenty years, the computer algorithm somehow decided I needed an additional math class. I had taken Statistics (twice) and College Algebra (twice) and as I told my advisor, I would drop out again before taking an additional math that I did not need. My major, English, required just two maths and that was that. He fixed it. Physics? Never. But I digress.

The characters at the center of this love story both march to the beat of their own drummers. They are both brilliant, hard-working, dedicated to their studies, and ambitious, albeit in different ways. Yet there is that strong physical attraction that defies all the logic in the world and that is what initially draws them together. Then they become inseparable.

Jake goes on to fulfill his dreams of running his own hedge fund and earning billions of dollars. But before he does, he realizes that Sophie has given up on her ambition, some theory about time (I don’t know exactly how to explain it because I didn’t really care to understand it.) So he dumps her at graduation. She goes back to work, but both of them experience this feeling that somehow they are still together. My best understanding of it is it most resembles this thing they do on Star Trek where there is a parallel universe: same people, same surroundings, but different behaviors and outcomes. Whatever. 

They both go on to have enormously successful, yet lonely lives. Until they meet again, some thirty years in the future. The future looks exactly like the present except the Apple watches are called something else and do a lot more.

I’m not explaining this well, sorry. It’s not an easy story to pin down with a few sentences. Bottom line? I loved the beginning, struggled to get through the middle, but it was worth it in the end.

2/2021 Stacy Alesi, AKA the BookBitch™