What Matters Most

Maybe in Another Life follows the same concept as the Gwyneth Paltrow movie Sliding Doors. What if some event in your life happened one way instead of another? In this case, our main character Hannah Martin just moved back to Los Angeles, and will be living with her best friend Gabby and her husband. They all go out to a party and at that party Hannah runs into her ex-boyfriend Ethan. Now she faces a choice. Will she go home with Ethan and restart her relationship with him? Or will she go home with Gabby and her husband? When she goes home with Ethan, they immediately have chemistry, but Hannah soon realizes that she’s pregnant with her previous fling’s child. When she goes home with Gabby, she gets hit by a car and while in the hospital, is tended to by a nurse named Henry, though their relationship is complicated due to Henry’s professional duties.

While the set up seems to play out as two completely separate romance novels, there is a commonality underlying the book. The author wants us to realize something about what matters most in life, and that it’s not always love. Through everything that Hannah and Gabby experience, we see that the strongest relationship in both lives isn’t the relationship Hannah has with her romantic interests or her family but rather with Gabby. And it makes sense! Because Hannah makes millions upon millions of decisions every day, and each of them lead her one way or another. But she remarks throughout the book that she’s felt that these decisions keep pulling her without any direction. But Los Angeles and more particularly Gabby provides her with that anchor. And Hannah does the same for her.

This book is a wonderful read. I read it mostly on a flight and while the book seems to accelerate at a break-neck pace, the message of the book is clear. Hannah is a terrific narrator for the book as she never seems too perfect nor overly quirky. She seems realistic in her interactions with others and in her thoughts about herself. Gabby is also terrifically characterized as her no-nonsense best friend. She served as a good foil to Hannah’s aloofness at times. But the book is best when they are together. While both Henry and Ethan are fine characters as is, they are really there to show Hannah’s growth and show how Gabby, not Henry or Ethan, is the most important person in her life. Maybe in another life, I’d be somewhere else, reading a different book, living in a different city, doing a different job. But I know that even with the variability of choices, I’ll have people in my lives that will remain constant. This book is for the people who believe that, want to see that in book for, or just want a romantic novel where the romance serves as a backdrop for the more important relationship of friendship.