I Love You I Love You I Love You Author : Laura Dockrill ISBN-13 : 978-0008586911 Publisher : HQ Guideline Price : £16.99 Last September, comedian Monica Heisey published her debut novel, Really Good Actually. It was a fictionalised account of becoming a divorcee in her late twenties.
In reading Laura Dockrill’s debut adult fiction, I shared the same sort of feeling as I had in reading Heisey’s work. I wished both authors had simply written a memoir. Dockrill’s novel follows the friendship and tentative romance of Ella and Lowe from their early teens to their mid-thirties.
It is a “will they, won’t they, tale”, tinged with noughties nostalgia that draws closely from the author’s personal experience of the “pain and pleasure of first love”. In many ways, I am Dockrill’s perfect reader; a single, thirtysomething millennial consumed by adolescent lust. I am a sucker for an against-all-odds love story and maintain an ability to pine like a 15-year-old who has just returned with their first heartbreak from the Gaeltacht.
When Lowe compliments Ella’s writing for being “alive”, he is spot on. The legacy of Dockrill’s young adult writing career is evident in chirpy prose that brims with exclamation marks, superlatives and capitalisations. READ MORE I Love You I Love You I Love You by Laura Dockrill: A ‘will they, won’t they, tale’, tinged with noughties nostalgia Wild Geese by Soula Emmanuel: Remakes emigration and its impact on relationships in an .
