{"id":7275,"date":"2026-09-12T04:10:33","date_gmt":"2026-09-12T04:10:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/?p=7275"},"modified":"2026-09-12T04:10:33","modified_gmt":"2026-09-12T04:10:33","slug":"love-felt-like-this-by-julie-olivia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/?p=7275","title":{"rendered":"Love Felt Like This by Julie Olivia"},"content":{"rendered":"

A puppeteer is booked on a live variety show for four minutes of harmless nonsense with a blue bird on her arm. A musician is on the same bill. Something goes wrong on air, the two of them end up improvising their way out of it, and the whole thing is over in a matter of seconds. By the next morning it has a name, a sound, several hundred thousand viewers and a comment section in which strangers are confidently establishing whether these two people are sleeping together. Nobody involved is asked. Love Felt Like This by Julie Olivia<\/strong> is a fake-dating romance about a woman reviving a cancelled children\u2019s television show and a rock star who cannot finish his album, and it is also, quietly and persistently, a book about what an audience decides it is owed.<\/p>\n

The Woman Who Was Already Famous for the Wrong Reasons<\/h2>\n

Beverly Lark arrives in the novel with a history that most romance heroines are spared.<\/p>\n

Her long relationship with another musician ended publicly and badly, and a piece of footage from those years followed her around for two of them. Not footage of anything she did wrong. Simply footage. His fans found her, and the words they used are words she can still hear, years later, when a stranger mutters something at her in a crowd.<\/p>\n

Love Felt Like This by Julie Olivia<\/strong> keeps this in the background rather than making a set piece of it, which is the right call and also the reason it lands. A reading group will notice how much of Beverly\u2019s caution, her instinct to work rather than to want, and her habit of putting a puppet between herself and a room, traces back to a period when several thousand people she had never met agreed that she was the problem.<\/p>\n

What Love Felt Like This Says About the Audience<\/h2>\n

The novel is broken up, four times, by pages that reproduce a social media post and the comments beneath it.<\/p>\n

They are very well done. The jokes are the jokes people actually make. The theories are the theories. There is always one person insisting the whole thing is faked, one person announcing a physical reaction to it, and one person asking a question that is nobody\u2019s business at all, with a number beside it showing how many others agreed. The comments are never addressed by the characters. They simply sit there in the middle of a warm domestic novel like a cold draught under a door.<\/p>\n

Love Felt Like This by Julie Olivia<\/strong> never lectures about this. It just keeps cutting away from two people making pancakes to show the room full of strangers watching them do it, and lets a group work out for themselves whether they have ever been one of the voices in that room.<\/p>\n

A Child Who Did Not Consent to Any of It<\/h2>\n

The sharpest thing in the book concerns a two-year-old.<\/p>\n

Griffin Harvey has been raising his daughter without telling the public she exists, which reads at first like the standard secret-baby machinery and turns out to be something more considered. He is not hiding her out of shame. He is hiding her because the moment her face is available, it will be available forever, and she is two, and nobody has asked her.<\/p>\n

Love Felt Like This by Julie Olivia<\/strong> is unsentimental about how that protection eventually fails, and about the fact that it was always going to. Groups may want to read around sharenting<\/a> before meeting, because the argument the book is making about consent and small children extends well past the famous, and lands closest to home for the people least likely to think it applies to them.<\/p>\n

The Town That Agreed to Lie<\/h2>\n

The most charming sequence in Love Felt Like This by Julie Olivia<\/strong> is also its most morally slippery, and that is worth an hour of anyone\u2019s evening.<\/p>\n

When the pressure arrives, a small North Carolina town closes ranks. A grandmother works the telephone. A diner refuses to seat reporters. An uncle on a bicycle shouts at parked cars. Every single one of them agrees, cheerfully and without much discussion, to tell a lie to anyone who asks.<\/p>\n

It is written as warmth, and it is warmth. It is also a whole community deciding that a stranger\u2019s privacy outranks the truth, on about ninety seconds of deliberation, because they like him and he brought his daughter to breakfast. A group that takes that seriously will find the scene more interesting than the romance around it.<\/p>\n

Where Love Felt Like This Loses Its Nerve<\/h2>\n

Not everything is handled with this much care.<\/p>\n

The ex-boyfriend is a cartoon.<\/strong> He is given no interiority and no argument, which lets everyone off a hook the book has otherwise been careful to keep baited.
\nThe person who leaks is barely a character.<\/strong> A book this interested in audiences might have wanted to understand one of them.
\nThe separation late on is a decision made for the reader\u2019s benefit.<\/strong> Both leads believe it is wrong while they are saying it.
\nThe length tells.<\/strong> The comfortable middle stretch could be considerably shorter without losing a thing.<\/p>\n

Love Felt Like This by Julie Olivia<\/strong> is still a genuinely warm novel, and the last eighty pages are worth the wait.<\/p>\n

Questions Worth Bringing to Love Felt Like This<\/h2>\n

Start with the comment sections. Ask the group to read one aloud and then ask, honestly, whether anything in it is worse than something they have thought about a stranger this month. The room usually goes quiet, and then it gets good.<\/p>\n

The second question in Love Felt Like This by Julie Olivia<\/strong> is the child. Griffin\u2019s decision to keep his daughter off the internet is presented as obviously correct. Ask whether the group agrees, and then ask the harder version: how many photographs of somebody else\u2019s child are currently sitting on their own phone, and who put them there.<\/p>\n

Third, and worth saving: the town lies. Ask the group whether they would have joined in. Almost everyone says yes. Then ask what the lie would have to be about before they refused, and watch how quickly the warmth in that scene starts to look like something else.<\/p>\n

Groups that finish this one should try If It Makes You Happy<\/a>, the author\u2019s other recent standalone, which works a gentler version of the same second-chance ache. The Love Lyric<\/a> by Kristina Forest suits anyone who wants more of the music industry and less of the internet. This Could Be Us<\/a> by Kennedy Ryan is the choice for a group that came for the parenting rather than the fame. And Under Your Spell<\/a> by Laura Wood is the lightest of the four, for a month when the group wants to be charmed and left alone.<\/p>\n

After the Last Page<\/h2>\n

The last of the four social media interludes arrives near the end. There is a photograph, and there is a caption, and where every previous interlude has given the reader a scrolling column of strangers with their opinions and their little tallies of agreement, this one has a single word in brackets instead.<\/p>\n

Comments are disabled.<\/p>\n

That is the closest Love Felt Like This by Julie Olivia<\/strong> comes to making its argument out loud, and it does it with a piece of interface furniture rather than a speech. For four hundred pages the audience has been allowed to talk over the top of two people\u2019s lives, and at the end somebody finally reaches over and switches them off. What a group is left holding is not the proposal or the ending, but the small, slightly startling relief of that empty space, and the question of why relief is what it feels like.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A puppeteer is booked on a live variety show for four minutes of harmless nonsense with a blue bird on her arm. A musician is on the same bill. Something goes wrong on air, the two of them end up improvising their way out of it, and the whole thing is over in a matter […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7275","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bookreviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7275"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7275"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7275\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7275"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7275"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7275"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}