A Love Letter to Whiskey by Kandi Steiner

A Love Letter to Whiskey by Kandi Steiner is a highly compelling and emotionally intense romance novel that spans many years and a handful of others and explores the subject of timing, fate, and unrequited love. Told from the point of view of B, the narrator, the story tells how B views Jamie as if ‘he was whiskey, which is like tasty, smooth, sweet tasting, and damn near devastating in large quantities.’

Jamie meets B through his best friend Jenna, who is dating him at the time, and the novel starts. Nevertheless, from the start, he’s attracted, but she keeps her feelings repressed out of loyalty. All this is until Jamie and Jenna break up, and then B and Jaime fall onto the edge of an actual relationship, but in a strictly platonic and degenerate way. While in life, time or circumstance keeps getting in the way. All of them go out in other relationships, progress on their own, or break somebody’s heart, but these girls have a deep chemistry where they can’t stay away from each other.

Jamie’s entry into B’s life is consuming and written beautifully juxtaposing push and pull, fighting the crazy in their feelings, timing, and subsequent mistakes. From the beginning of the book, whiskey is used as the metaphor and refers to their relationship, intense, heady, destructive.

The ride can be a roller coaster of emotions, love complicated, timing even harder, and the split should be even more difficult to make. What it comes down to basically is just two people in love with each other, as much as they don’t know how to love each other, stumbling through their love and through life.