Love You Madly

by Daisy Jones, Lucinda Hooley

When your life is a big open sky just waiting for you to let go and jump, and it feels like anything is possible. And it really is. And you really do jump. And for a time it feels like you’re flying, even as you fall.
It’s all about love. Crazy, heart-breaking, rest-of-your-life-defining love.
Sisters Mielie and Mare, in their early twenties in Cape Town in the mid-1990s, stand on the edge of everything they’ve dreamed of and also yet to imagine.
Mielie feels happier when there’s a script to follow. Mare’s making it up as she goes along.
Both follow their hearts, in different directions, to different lives with different friends and lovers in different cities on different continents
Of course nothing goes as hoped or planned.
But it’s their letters to each other, through all of it, that frame who they’re becoming and remind them who they are.

352 pages, Paperback

Published December 1, 2021

Reviews

[Maire Fisher · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'd like to set a scene. Imagine you're settling on to a comfy couch, a new book unopened on your lap. As you turn page after page, you're transported back to the 1990s. You're shuttled between South Africa and England, Johannesburg, Wimbledon, Woodstock. Seamlessly shuttled might I add. As you move from one place to another, you're drawn deeper and deeper into the lives of two young women, Amelia and Marigold, Mielie and Mare. You get to know their friends, their foes. You laugh with them, cry for them, hope and dream for them. And at the very end of this book, you sit, as I did, blinking, a bit dazed, as if you've stepped out of a movie house in the late afternoon sun. Love You Madly by Daisy Jones and Lucinda Hooley is a binge of a book if ever there were.

[Anne Taylor · Rating 5 out of 5]

I usually have two books on the go: one, on audio; the other in print. And this duo of books are on two ends of a long spectrum: Megan Hunter’s The Harpy is a short, beautiful and brutal meditation on marriage, motherhood and violence. Lucy takes revenge on her adulterous husband in three deliberate ways. It’s odd, but very good indeed. Daisy Jones and Lucinda Hooley are doing something very different with Love You Madly - a South African story of two young women (Mielie and Mare) as they leap off into their lives. It’s also about love and heartbreak - but in a completely different register. One, packs a bruising punch; the other is a long, deep and familiar hug. If anyone wants to know what I love about reading, these two books help explain it.

[Helené Coetzee · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beautiful adaptation of one of my favourite classics (Sense and Sensibility). I loved how the authors imagined it in a South Africa in the 90's context.

[Alistair Mackay · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lovely and warm. Funny. Why can’t we read love stories of twenty-somethings in Cape Town, Joburg and London in the 1990s? The references and characters all reminded me of my brother and his friends, when I was a tween. Nostalgic and happy - just what I felt like.

[Tracey Farren · Rating 5 out of 5]

I missed this book for weeks after I finished it. Even now I can open the book to any page and find some surprising retort or observation that makes me grin. I only ever read the study guide for Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. During first year English I was too busy having my heart shattered and super gluing it back together with loud Meatloaf songs and cheap Tassies wine.
I renounced love stories after a lethal addiction to Mills and Boone during my teenage years. After my first boyfriend went and slept with my friend, I realised that the one and a half chapters that Mills and Boon conceded to crippling pain was a lying understatement. Still, I fell to the movie, Four Weddings and a Funeral. I found myself secretly falling in love with Hugh Grant’s skew grin even while my feminist sensibility was busting me badly for flirting again with the white knight myth. It’s the same with Love You, Madly. The big difference is, the book has enough irreverent, intelligent women in it to airlift it out of frail yearning. The sisters, Mielie and Mare Millie know how to slam back their sorrow with alcoholic shooters, berate themselves for being gullible and show up for their friends. They use grim courage and seriously funny irony to crawl out of the sucking dark of their broken hearts and well…
If you’re suspicious of love stories, just this one time don’t fight it. This Jane Austen knockoff is irresistible. Dammit.

[Rika Burger · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely adored it. Witty and funny, took me back to the 90s! Sisterly love at its best.