Every result can be manipulated … even between best friends.
The promise: To wait for each other after their road trip.
The where: Brookline, Massachusetts.
The when: Thanksgiving.
The bump: Evan Gilmore was a no-show.
The reason: He met the one who would change it all.
The consequence: There is no AJ and Evan … not anymore.
The Results of Unrequited (Book 3) SPOILER FREE!
Every time I sit down to write about international bestseller Len Webster and her novels, I always have a hard time starting. Her novels inspire something inside of me that almost no other writer has managed to do. From April 18 to July 11 and now to November 14, we’ve had 3 of the 4 Science of Unrequited novels drop in 2018.
After being left hanging from the ending of The Solution of Unrequited since July, Webster makes sure to start book three with a bang, and begins it all by shattering our hearts once more. Once again, within a matter of only two days, I enthusiastically read through Webster’s newest release, and once again, she took my heart along for the ride.
In the first book, The Theory of Unrequited, we learned about our main characters, Alex “AJ” Parker and Evan Gilmore, and how they grew up as each other’s best friends, following their senior year of high school and freshman year of college. We learn how Alex decided to forgo her acceptance to Stanford and go as far away from Evan as possible for college: Duke University. Having realized through senior year of high school how much she’s in love with her best friend and he didn’t love her, she couldn’t bear her heart to suffer anymore.
In book two, The Solution to Unrequited, Evan finds Alex at Duke after not telling him where she is for nearly three months, and the two road trip back to Brookline, Massachusetts, their hometown, while they each explain their feelings and why they made the choices they did during senior year of high school, including Alex hiding from Evan.
Now, for book three, we have a major time jump, going from fall break of freshman year to now late winter of sophomore year. Not only have Alex and Evan not spoken for over a year and a half, but also her life is completely different since finally making sure Evan was no longer going to hurt her.
Webster gave no indications that when starting this novel, we’d be thrown a year and a half into the future with our characters. She kept fans out of the loop while she continued editing, telling everyone she couldn’t give any details or any sneak peeks for Results. She only revealed we were finished with Alex and Evan’s story from high school, and we’d exclusively follow them through college.
However, what she neglected to tell us was how much pain she’d bring to our hearts.
While we follow Alex and her new relationship, her studies to become a famous physicist, and her friendship with her roommate Savannah, we learn more about the abrupt year and a half gap between the novels. The description says it all. Evan promised they would wait, and then broke his promise. And left behind a severely broken hearted Alex.
As we follow mainly Alex’s point of view through the novel, we come to understand how heartbroken she was, picking up the pieces of herself while Evan never responded to her. We watch her struggle her way through the second half of her freshman year of college, and how she handles knowing Evan met her.
There are very few novels that somehow manage to capture such real and raw emotions such as Alex and Evan’s. While Webster’s first published series, the Thirty-Eight Series, were truly powerful when it comes to love that can never be, there’s something new and emotional about this current series.
A fun Easter egg for Webster fans is that Alex is the daughter of the main characters from Thirty-Eight Days and Thirty-Eight Reasons, Noel and Clara Parker. Knowing their love story and watching their daughter go through her own struggle is something of an honor after following Webster since the beginning. Noel and Clara’s battle for love adds to the torturous pain of Alex falling in love with not only her best friend Evan but also her boyfriend. Watching Noel, the overprotective father, take matters into his own hands when the men in Alex’s life break her heart adds depth to a series not many authors are capable of doing.
So with Noel and Clara’s story, Alex and Evan’s story, and watching tears shed from our main characters eyes, they bring chest pains. Love is never an easy thing to understand, but in Webster’s novels, you’ll find yourself desperately hoping for some similar version of a love story such as the Parker family’s.
Each page of confessions, gut-wrenching glances, nervous kisses, and tear-soaked faces captured my attention throughout. I never wanted to stop reading, not wanting to tear myself away from Brookline or Duke, Alex or Evan, and their story of unrequited.
It’s rare an author manages to cause such powerful emotions from me. Anger and happiness are easy. Sadness that brings on sobbing isn’t something novels invoke inside of me. It takes a person of powerful skill to manage to bring out the raw pain that readers don’t normally expect when sitting down to read a novel. To have the ability to hurt a reader in this way is a talent—one I truly envy.
Webster may only be in her mid-twenties, but she is capable of turning the world of romance and young adult fiction on its head. No author matches the power in her fingertips on a keyboard. No author grabs your heart and manages to hold it so tight as to wait for four novels for an answer for “will-they, won’t-they.” No author is as genuinely kind as Webster is to her fans and her novels. She treats them with such care and love that it’s somewhat unbelievable how successful she is at such a young age.
With one novel left in The Science of Unrequited series, there are several questions still unanswered, so many tears are left to cry and our characters have so much growth to go. Webster has teased the novel will drop at the beginning of 2019, but with only a title and the information she has finished the final edits this week, fans are left in the dark once more with Webster’s words.
The only thing that is certain is this last book will not be an easy feat for readers to get through. Webster always promises pain, and always delivers on those promises.
For more information on Webster, visit her website here. Find this book on any of these platforms: Amazon, Barnes and Noble, iBooks
Start reading The Science of Unrequited, and fall in love with Evan & AJ.
“Evan Gilmore was holmium. He strengthened her and absorbed her pain as holmium does to neutrons to keep a chain reaction under control. He prevented the destruction of her. He took her pain and guided her back to her dreams.”
Excerpt From: Len Webster. “The Results of Unrequited.” iBooks.