Alison Hammer’s You and Me and Us will make you believe in love again

We’ve all lost someone we loved much too soon. That’s why books like You and Me and Us are essential reads for anyone with a heart.

Whenever I pick up a book that exists solely to make its readers weep (in a good way!), I immediately enter a private competition with my former self.

As I turn to the first page and begin to read, I remind myself, “You cried the last time you read a sad book even though you said you wouldn’t. Not this time. You’re going to make it through this whole story without losing a single tear.”

I fail this challenge miserably almost every time. And reading You and Me and Us was no exception.

We’ve all read “cancer stories” before. Many of us (myself included) have lived through some version of them in real life. Despite how a story like this might end (not all of them end the way you’re expecting), they are always sad.

The good ones, though, offer up just enough hope to make up for that sadness. Such as Alison Hammer’s debut novel about a family on the verge of coming apart … until the promise of death intervenes.

Alexis and Tommy are in love; they pretty much always have been. But their daughter CeCe, while she adores her father, just can’t relate to her workaholic mother. Only when Tommy’s cancer diagnosis sends the family on one final vacation are the two forced to find common ground.

Told from the two perspectives of mother and daughter, this story looks at both grief and love from more than one angle. With every page, you know you’re getting closer to an ending you don’t want to believe is real … just like the characters narrating those very pages.

It doesn’t just pull you into the story, either. It sweeps in all your emotional baggage, every memory you’ve ever had with the people you’ve loved and lost. It makes the narrative real. But it feels good to let those tears fall. Maybe you’ve been holding them in for a while. Not after this book. Not a chance.

So many stories like this end when one of the main characters reaches the end of their life, or shortly after their funeral. But this one doesn’t. It extends into that dark and empty period, the one no one likes to talk about — the part of losing a loved one where you walk back into your empty house and realize you have to figure out how to continue on living when they won’t.

But it’s that moment in the story that finally resolves the conflict between these two main characters. After months of denial and struggling to figure out how to exist in the same world without the glue that held them together for so many years, Alexis and CeCe finally have to face the fact that the only way they’re going to survive being alone is by being alone together.

There’s more than one kind of love in this world. You and Me and Us perfectly shows us the ups and downs of love’s variants — the love between partners, between friends, between fathers and their daughters, and between daughters and their mothers.

No matter which kind you think you’ve lost hope in ever finding again, chances are you’ll rediscover it here. Loss is tragic. Loss hurts. But it does tend to leave us with something we may not have had before: A closer bond with the people who aren’t going anywhere anytime soon.

You and Me and Us is available on April 7 wherever books are sold.