🎧 Reviewed by LD | Rating: 2.4/5 | Steam: 🔥🔥🔥 | Standalone
⚠️ This is a full spoiler review. If you haven’t read Love You More yet — go read it first. We’ll be here when you’re done.
The Opening
Emily Giffin can write. That’s not the problem here. The problem is that this book had a genuinely great setup, solid characters, and about seven and a half hours of me being fully invested, and then the ending showed up and ruined everything. Like, actually made me mad. Not “ugh, okay” mad. Mad mad.
Let’s get into it.
The Full Story — Spoilers Included
The Setup
Billy is recently engaged to her fiancé Dean when she gets a call from Mick, her high school and college ex-boyfriend. She doesn’t call him back right away, and the book takes us into their history through flashbacks.
They were friends first. Junior year of high school, Billy assumed Mick was going to ask her to prom. He asked someone else instead. She stopped talking to him. Eventually he broke up with that girl, told Billy he had feelings for her and always should have asked her, and she was with a different guy at the time so she just said, too bad, you missed your chance.
Then a couple of weeks later she broke up with her boyfriend and went back to Mick anyway, because she couldn’t stop thinking about him. They were together long-term through high school and decided to go to the same college. And that part was actually sweet.
Then she gets accepted to Columbia for medical school, and Mick goes home. Long distance for four years. She keeps canceling visits to study. She misses a friend’s wedding because she needs to study. Everyone around her is getting fed up with how unavailable she is. She gets offered a summer research assistantship in New York, tells Mick, and he says “I expected this” in a way that just hurts. Then he ends it. He doesn’t think her residency will be anywhere close to home, and he’s right. It won’t be.
They lose contact completely. She goes through all of college and residency, and the book covers a lot of years in those chapters. A lot of that doesn’t really matter.
Erin and Phoebe
During residency, Billy’s best friend Erin tells her she’s pregnant. The dad is not in the picture. Billy is an OB/GYN, so this brings them back into each other’s lives in a big way. She’s Erin’s support person through everything. Phoebe is born.
Fast forward eleven years. Phoebe is a kid now. Billy is engaged to Dean. And that’s when Mick calls.
She finally calls him back. He tells her Erin was in a car accident and didn’t survive. Billy doesn’t believe him at first. He gives her the details, tells her where to find it in the news. She holds it together all day, gets home to Dean, and eventually tells him her best friend is dead.
And here’s where I started noticing something. Billy seems really emotionally detached through all of this. I get that she’s a doctor who deals with life and death constantly. But the way she talks about losing Erin is just odd. There’s almost no grief there.
The Funeral and the Custody Offer
Dean offers to come with her to the funeral. There’s a conference he’s supposed to be at, and she tells him it’s better for him to be at the conference than at her friend’s funeral. That’s a choice.
She goes alone. Runs into Mick, who is seeing someone. Then Erin’s mom Joan pulls them both aside. Erin apparently wanted them both to have custody of Phoebe. They accept.
I was genuinely shocked that Erin would want Mick involved in Phoebe’s custody, because I didn’t get the impression she was close with Mick like that. But okay.
Mick asks if Billy can move back. She says she’ll talk to Dean. He says nevermind, he’ll just do it alone. And yet they keep being very much in each other’s orbit, so.
Dean, Custody, and the Mess
Billy bonds a little with Phoebe and goes home. She tells Dean about the custody situation. He says he’s in, Phoebe can stay with Billy until her lease runs out, and then they can all live together in New York. But Billy says she doesn’t think uprooting Phoebe to New York is best for the kid, and that they should move to where Phoebe is. Dean says, okay, if you want to do it, let’s do it.
He was being really supportive. I actually liked Dean for a while.
Then it comes out that Dean got invited to interview for a trauma director position in New York, which would be hard to turn down. Understandable. Then Mick tells them that Erin’s friend Kara is filing for custody because there’s nothing in writing, no will, and Phoebe does not want to live with Kara or her kids. If Kara files first, she’ll probably get it. Dean actually tells Billy they should file first, and for a moment I thought he was being great. But then he tells Billy he’s up for sole custody, just not joint custody with Mick.
He asks Billy to just tell him she doesn’t have feelings for Mick. She says she doesn’t.
The next morning Dean’s changed his flight. He’s leaving early because he thinks it’ll be easier for her to sort things out without him. He asks her to keep an open mind about moving to New York eventually.
The Diary
Mick and Phoebe have a conversation with Billy about the possibility of Phoebe going to New York for a trial year. Phoebe actually really wants to. Billy calls Dean to tell him, and you can tell he’s excited because he really wasn’t into uprooting his whole life, regardless of what he had been saying.
Then Billy finds Erin’s pregnancy diary. There’s a notation about M.
M thinks he could be the father. Erin told M it was definitely not him. But, Billy decides M is Mick. Billy calls him and he admits it: they slept together once. One time. He doesn’t believe he’s the father at Erin’s insistence, but Billy, the OB/GYN, explains implantation bleeding versus a period, and the timing actually does line up. There’s a very real chance Mick could be Phoebe’s biological father.
Your lifelong best friend and your ex-boyfriend. One time. And both of them kept it from you for years. I genuinely cannot imagine.
Billy is hurt. She’s mad. She heads back to New York. Dean says he needs a paternity test before he’s comfortable with any of this, which is completely valid. She tells Mick, he agrees immediately, no problem. They go to the appointment and find out that state law says you can’t get a paternity test without being a legal guardian or listed on the birth certificate. So to get the paternity test, they have to file for custody first.
The Ending That Made Me Mad
Billy files for temporary custody. Granted for six months, under the condition that she establishes a stable residence where Phoebe lives. Fine.
She goes to New York to get her things and she and Dean have the real talk. He says this really hurts, not the six months part but the fact that she’s doing this knowing Mick could be the father. He says he’s not her partner in this. If Mick is the dad, Mick is going to get custody anyway. If Mick isn’t the dad, why is Mick her partner in any of it?
He calls off the engagement.
I had been rooting for Dean. But calling off an engagement because she wants to take care of her dead best friend’s child? Phoebe just lost her mom. Her grandmother is going into memory care. And Dean is essentially saying, it’s Phoebe or me. What a thing to do.
Billy is oddly understanding. This whole thing is so weird.
Then she basically goes straight to tell Mick they broke up. Why? That is not information Mick needed. It has nothing to do with him. The book is setting up what’s coming and it is not subtle about it. Surprise, Mick is also single.
Then Dean calls Billy one night. Just checking in. He just broke up with her. Why is he calling her to chat? Also weird.
Mick tells Billy he’ll wait on the paternity test, and then also tells her that even if he IS the father, Phoebe can still live with Billy. What? Nothing about this last section of the book makes logical sense. They have joint custody with the intention of figuring out the paternity situation, and his suggestion is to just not care about the results?
The trial happens for the drunk driver who killed Erin. Billy gives a victim impact statement. It’s not entirely clear what she’s even saying up there, whether she’s asking for a harsher sentence or speaking toward forgiveness. The scene just kind of exists.
And then Mick asks Billy out for supper. Just the two of them.
He slept with her best friend. He lied about it for years. Erin lied about it for years. And now the book wants me to root for their reunion — it does not feel built for. It feels like something the book decided in the last twenty minutes.
They go to dinner. He tells her he never stopped loving her. They kiss.
Epilogue, three years later: Phoebe and Billy moved in with Mick two years ago. They got joint custody after the six-month temporary order. Mick is not the father. They’re all moving to New York now, happy as can be. Phoebe is perfectly well-adjusted, apparently totally fine, her mom is dead but everybody’s great.
I don’t not get it…. I do get it. I just didn’t want it.
The Best Part of This Book
The first seven and a half hours, genuinely. The writing is good. The setup is interesting. The Erin’s diary reveal felt like a real gut punch. Right up until that last hour of this audiobook I probably would have given this a four out of five. The story had real momentum and I cared about where it was going.
The Worst Part of This Book
The ending. All of it. Billy’s emotional detachment through a book where her best friend dies. Phoebe showing zero grief about losing her mom. Dean becoming the villain for not wanting to co-parent alongside his fiancée’s ex. Billy randomly telling Mick she and Dean broke up like that was somehow his business. And the reunion that the book decided these two deserved, even after everything that came out about Mick and Erin. It all just went off the rails and never came back. And Phoebe — she just lost her mother, yet there is no actual grief in this book. Apparently taking the girl shopping once just made her whole life great again.
The Steam Rating Breakdown
🔥🔥🔥 / 5 — Some heat in here but nothing explicit.
The Ending — Satisfied or Disappointed?
Disappointed. Pretty deeply. I was with this book for most of it and the last stretch dropped everything that made the story interesting in favour of a tidy happy ever after that felt written for different characters. Nobody really cried. Nobody really struggled. They just moved in together and everything was fine.
Would I Reread It?
Absolutely not. Still kind of annoyed about it, honestly.
Who Is This For
If you love Emily Giffin and you go in without expectations, you might find this easier to enjoy than I did. If you need your characters to actually process the hard things that happen to them, this one is going to frustrate you.
Where to Get This Book
📖 Physical Book
Amazon US | Amazon CA | Bookshop.org
🎧 Audiobook
Audible US | Audible CA | Libro.fm
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Plot Twisted. 🔥
🎧 | Standalone | Genre: Contemporary Romance / Women’s Fiction | Steam: 🔥🔥🔥