All the men I've loved again : a novel / Christine Pride.

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

From Christine Pride, the beloved coauthor of the Good Morning America Book Club Pick We Are Not Like Them , comes a dazzling solo debut novel about a woman who finds herself in the impossible situation of being in love with the same two men who won her heart in her early twenties again as she nears forty.

It's 1999, TLC's "No Scrubs" is topping the charts, y2k is looming on everyone's mind, and Cora Belle has arrived at college ready to change her life. She's determined to grow out of the shy, sheltered girl who attended an all-white prep in her all-white suburb. Cora is ready to conquer her fears and find her people, her place in the world, and herself.

What she's totally unprepared for is Lincoln, with his dark skin, charming southern drawl, and that smile. Because how can you ever prepare yourself for the rollercoaster of first love with all its glorious, bewildering contradictions? Just when Cora thinks she's got things figured out, a series of surprises and secrets threaten to upend everything she thought she understood about love and loyalty.

In the wake of these developments and a shocking tragedy, a new man enters Cora's life--Aaron--further complicating everything. He's the only one who seems to get her, and the letters she writes to him when the two are separated reveal the truth of their inescapable connection. There's only one problem--how can she fall in love with one man when her heart belongs to another?

Twenty years later, and Cora is all grown up, or mostly, and has cloaked herself in loneliness like a warm blanket. It's the safest choice. But then an unexpected reconnection and a chance encounter puts her right back where she started. The same two men, the same agonizing decision.

Finding herself in this position--again--will test everything Cora thought she knew about fate, love, and most importantly, herself. All The Men I've Loved Again is a big-hearted coming-of-age story for anyone who's thought what if about a past love and what it would be like to have a second chance.

Excerpt provided by Syndetics

1. Cora Doesn't Know What to Do with Herself CORA DOESN'T KNOW WHAT TO DO WITH HERSELF August 1999 Cora Belle arrived at college determined to conquer her fears once and for all. There were many: spiders; thick soups with unidentifiable ingredients; failure; getting lost, both physically and metaphorically; being late; being early; being alone; getting cancer. Love. Her plan was simple: She would completely transform herself into someone who was brave, confident, chill, and knew how to pull off a smoky eye. She would use her time at Hamlin to put herself together like a puzzle, take all the fledgling identities, fragments of personality and haphazard aspirations, and assemble them into a coherent version of herself, ready for the daunting task of adulthood. Also, improve her posture while she was at it. She was not off to a good start. On any front. Standing with slumped shoulders in the long, snaking line in the Hamlin University bookstore, Cora faced a more urgent concern: trying not to burst into tears in front of hundreds of other students who'd set about procuring mountains of textbooks in the early hours of a hot, bright late-August morning. She looked around with wild eyes and barely concealed panic--what was she even doing in this place? Never mind that Cora had actively participated in all the steps to get here: printing out applications, taking the SATs, writing essay after essay about riveting topics like "a time you've faced a challenge," and tearing at the big white envelope from Hamlin Admissions when it arrived. Not to mention carefully packing sweaters and CDs, a stack of pristine Moleskine notebooks, and the stuffed Snoopy she'd had since she was a baby, currently stashed in the freshly unpacked duffel under the bed in her dorm room. Hidden, but close. Had Cora ever been away from home before, she might have known to steel herself for the homesickness that consumed her as soon as her father grabbed her by both shoulders last night, trained his wide brown eyes on her, and said, "Well, I'd best be going now, Cora. You're going to be good, you hear? I know you know that even if you don't fully believe it yet." But she was bowled over by the unfamiliar feeling when Wes hugged her goodbye and had the audacity to drive away. After watching the lights of her father's Acura until they faded from sight, Cora scurried up four flights of stairs (thereby avoiding the packed elevators) to her single room, the one she'd scored on account of exaggerated allergies, even though it was the prospect of living with a complete stranger that made her break out in hives. In the privacy of her closet-size dorm room, she sobbed into a pillow as quietly as possible waiting for the tears to stop, or the sun to rise, whichever came first. It was a close race. By 7:00 a.m., before anyone else in the dorm seemed to have stirred, Cora slunk to the communal hall bathroom, where she patted cold water on her puffy eyes and brushed the teeth that four long years of braces had wrestled into place. She smiled into the mirror for a full thirty seconds because she'd read somewhere that it could change your mood even if it was fake. Cora attempted this strategy again now, grinning maniacally at no one and everyone in the packed bookstore that was brimming with the giddy energy of fresh starts, new adventures, and infinite possibilities. It was really quite oppressive. Especially when you factored in the body heat. There was a second there where Cora thought she might be okay; she even relaxed a little, shook out her tight shoulders, looked at a flyer on the wall inviting new students to "Come Kick It at Kippen Field" for a meet-and-greet picnic, and thought, Maybe? And then, just as she shuffled a few feet forward in line, an image came to her: her father, at home a hundred miles or so up I-95, opening the Washington Post and vigorously shaking it out, then folding the pages just right and going to read to her as he always did before realizing that she wasn't sitting across from him eating Frosted Flakes. Cora had been so focused on missing him, she hadn't stopped to consider how much he would miss her . Who would remind him to grab his travel coffee mug that he never failed to forget every single morning? Her eyes welled to dangerous levels as she thought of that stupid steel mug. And the sound of her father humming while he sorted the mail. The green shag carpet in her bedroom. The row of World Book encyclopedias on the shelf above her desk where her pencil holder, stapler, and framed baby picture were lined up in precise order. The pumpkin-shaped cookie jar in the kitchen that held stray dollar bills and spare keys. The list went on and on, and with each item (her towering piles of Seventeen magazines!), Cora was ratcheted up to an increasingly wretched state. She glanced frantically around searching for an escape, if not from the bookstore itself than somehow from the anxious vice grip of her mind, and that's when she saw him. Standing a few feet away, having materialized out of nowhere, was one of the most striking people Cora had ever seen. He stood out partly because he was so tall (at least six two) and partly because he was one of the only other brown faces around, but mainly because he was so... hot. Cora's extensive vocabulary was a source of pride but her addled brain couldn't come up with a more eloquent adjective to describe this stranger. She watched as he leaned over and dragged a sharp blade along the top of a large box at his feet. For whatever reason, this action played out in her mind in slow motion, such that she could see the subtle quivering of his forearm muscle as it flexed and released. When he stood back up, she zeroed in on the gold name tag attached to his bookstore uniform, a bright green polo: Lincoln Ames. Cora whispered it a few times under her breath. "Lincoln Ames. Lincoln Ames. Lincoln Ames." She hadn't before considered that a name could be attractive. But it was, along with so much else about him. First, his skin. For this, she was able to summon just the right SAT word: luminous . Cora had only heard that term applied to women and only in makeup commercials, but it was the perfect description. It was like someone had taken an ideal human form and poured the silkiest, smoothest dark chocolate over it. Everything about him was long; each of his limbs stretched an extra inch beyond the factory model. His eyes were as jet black and shiny as piano keys. But it was his lips that nearly did her in. Full, pillowy, and smooth in a way that called to mind clouds and mangoes. These lips were responsible for sending Cora stumbling into the person in front of her, who'd been aggressively nodding his head along to whatever was playing on the Discman clipped to his jeans. Guys like this, like Lincoln Ames, didn't exist in Cora's world outside John Singleton movies or the imaginary crushes she'd conjured that were all some version of a young James Earl Jones she once saw in one of the vintage Ebony magazines her father collected. Never in the flesh. It was as if she were in an elevator that had dropped too fast. There was a sudden, overwhelming wooziness and a warm heaviness deep within her, almost like vertigo but not quite. What she was experiencing was, of course, attraction, but Cora Belle was so unfamiliar with the concept and sensation, it registered mainly as confusion. She lost herself to the mesmerizing distraction of watching Lincoln stack stuffed teddy bears emblazoned with the Hamlin Huskies logo into a structurally sound pyramid, breaking his focus only to give coworkers fist bumps when they passed or greet customers like this was his store and he was welcoming people to his own personal back-to-school party. His whole affect--so upbeat, so affable--was the opposite of Cora's, which made her even more self-conscious to be the pathetic guest bringing down the vibe of the entire affair. But then she remembered that exactly no one, including Lincoln, was paying attention to her. In moments like this, Cora relished the fact that she typically felt invisible in most situations; it meant she could observe Lincoln in peace. Until. She felt the hands of someone on her. One of the two girls standing in line behind her reached out and touched her hair, causing Cora to startle and jump much more dramatically than the situation called for and in a way that drew too many eyes. Before spotting Lincoln, Cora had been eavesdropping on the girls' overanimated chatter, though they hadn't been so much conversing as squawking at each other like a pair of high-pitched birds; they exchanged the most basic biographical details as if each one was an astonishing twist of fate and destiny. "You're from New Jersey? No way! My parents have a house in Cape May." "Wait! You have an older brother? I have an older brother! We're three years apart too--crazy!" Based on these incredible commonalities, they were on their way to becoming best friends by the time they got to the front of the line. One already had complaints about her new roommate ("You would not believe how loudly she breathes "), which made Cora all the more grateful for her single. Cora reflexively swatted at the girl who'd touched her, the shorter one with a mane of shaggy curls swept up in a giant bedazzled butterfly clip. "Whoa, jeez, sorry, I was just... you still have the tag on your sweatshirt, you know?" "Oh, I forgot to cut it off, I guess." Cora assumed her dad had done it for her before he handed her the brand-new Huskies sweatshirt compliments of this store right here. "Here, let me rip it off for you." The girl went to lift Cora's braids to remove the tag, prompting Cora to dodge her again. "No! That's okay, I got it." Her tone was regrettably harsh. She hadn't meant to lash out like an alley cat, but the damage was done. Cora had thrown off her invisibility cloak and revealed the weird, fumbling girl she'd been trying to outrun. Worse than being invisible was being utterly exposed; it was Cora's curse to always find herself swinging between these two extremes. She tore off the offending tag and, not knowing what to do with it, clutched it in her clammy fist while an uncomfortable silence enveloped everyone involved. The girls were polite enough to wait until they were out of earshot to talk about her, but Cora could sense them exchanging a look: What's her problem? Good question. Actually, Cora knew exactly what her problem was--or problems. She, like everyone, had her fair share and kept a running list because knowledge was power. One of them was her desperation to escape people like this (as unfair as it might have been to lump them all together): white girls. The two in the bookstore were a composite of all the girls Cora had gone to school with, tiny with wide eyes and white-blond highlights and Juicy sweatsuits, all the ones who called her "girl" and asked how often she washed her hair and even how she washed her hair, who "joked" that with the right amount of Hawaiian Tropic they could get as dark as Cora over summer break. Girls who were nice enough but always made her feel like a curiosity. Shooting straight to the top of Cora's many aspirations for college was making friends--real and true girlfriends. Black girlfriends. The ones she dreamed of while watching reruns of Living Single . Cora wanted to, at last, get in where she fit in, which was the well-meaning but utterly useless advice her father gave her when it came to her social life, or rather the lack thereof. Fitting in was all but impossible at Prescott Academy, the prestigious prep school she'd attended for the entirety of her school years, where her father taught history, where the hefty annual tuition was waived because of that, and where one of the only other brown faces she saw had her exact same nose. This experience--spending her formative years as the only Black kid in a sea of white ones--had saddled Cora with a very particular kind of chronic identity crisis. Though she looked the part with her dark skin and cornrowed braids--the same style since first grade because her father had his hands full without having to devote time to reckoning with the complexities of hair every day--Cora still couldn't escape the feeling of being some sort of impostor. This was especially intense at her violin concerts, the summers she took riding lessons, and the rare occasion she found herself at a party in someone's wood-paneled basement nodding her head awkwardly to the Dave Matthews Band. Where did she belong? The question brought a fresh wave of panic. Actually, it wasn't the question itself but the prospect of never finding an answer that caused a hard knot to lodge right in the tender hollow between her belly and her ribs. As a single bead of hot sweat rolled down her temple, Cora again debated fleeing the line. A full-fledged panic attack would be worse than tears, worse than not having any books for the semester. But she wouldn't need books at all if she called her dad and demanded that he come pick her up. She was contemplating just how big a failure it would be not to make it even a full twenty-four hours on campus when she looked up and locked eyes on Lincoln Ames. Again. Only this time, he was staring right back. And smiling. The smile landed on her like the sun and heated her from the outside in, just like a strong ray of light. This wasn't the first time anyone had ever smiled at her, obviously, but it might as well have been, given the effect it had. Cora being Cora, she immediately hid her face, but mere seconds later she glanced up again despite herself, and he was still right there. His expression said, Yeah, you . Then he dropped his smile and looked serious, as if he were asking, You good? Was this pity because he'd seen that awkward exchange with the girls or noted her puffy eyes or nervous sweating? Or had she imagined it all? No, there was a warm place in her chest where the smile had left its mark. While she'd been busy working all that out, Cora had neglected to move her own cheeks a single millimeter, had merely stared at him blankly. By the time she'd come to the glaring realization that she could--should--smile back and how simple that would be, it was too late. Lincoln had returned to his work, lining up a row of beer cozies. An elderly couple with matching fanny packs approached him and he waved for them to follow him down an aisle. And then he was... gone. It was absurd that Cora would find this so upsetting. Then again, the prospect that he would return and smile at her again left her just as stricken. That both of these sentiments could be true should have been confounding, but Cora was used to half her thoughts and feelings being in direct opposition to the other half. Craning her head this way and that in an effort to spot him again, Cora considered an idea that was as audacious as it was intimidating, as out of character as it was thrilling. An act that would kick-start her transformation into the type of person she desperately wanted to be: If and when Lincoln returned, she would talk to him. Hi. Wow, it's so crowded, huh? I like your name. She tried out possibilities, each one more spectacularly lame than the last, but it occupied her mind until, finally, she reached the front of the line. The weary clerk with the crooked glasses took her printed course list and ferried textbooks from the metal shelves behind him to a mounting tower on the counter. She didn't mind that he moved at a pace only slightly faster than the pet turtle she'd once had, since it bought time for Lincoln to reappear. Except he never did. And Cora could only linger with the stack of books in her quivering arms for so long waiting for a second chance that never came. It didn't matter--that's what she told herself. The moment had passed, but it had also served its purpose. Inconsequential as it might have appeared, that random, warm smile and that strange connection was anything but meaningless for Cora. In fact, she would always think of it as magical, even though she would never admit that out loud. And even decades later, in a salon overlooking the Pacific, when she turns this memory over in her mind and checks it for flaws and hyperbole, that assessment will hold up. Because in that fleeting encounter with a captivating stranger, Cora got what she most needed and least expected right when it mattered the most: a reason to cling to a wild, willful hope that she might just be okay. Excerpted from All the Men I've Loved Again: A Novel by Christine Pride All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Publishers Weekly Review

Pride's flirty if occasionally frustrating solo debut (after We Are Not Like Them) follows Cora Belle from insecure college freshman to successful career woman torn between two very different men. Having been one of the very few Black students at her prestigious private school, Cora's excited to be in the more diverse environment of Hamlin University and make friends who look like her. She forges a lifelong bond with besties Kim and Neisha and dates Lincoln Ames, an ambitious scholarship student. Even Cora's overprotective single father loves Lincoln, but an unexpected betrayal drives the couple apart near graduation. Cora then rebounds into a fling with talented photographer Aaron that fizzles out when he moves abroad. Years later, with her 40th birthday fast approaching, both men reenter Cora's life, finally with serious intentions. There's some gratifying romantic wish-fulfilment to this premise, but Cora takes a disappointingly passive role in the love triangle as she waffles between men. Far more successful is the portrayal of female friendship and Cora's sweet relationship with her father. The passionate love scenes and strong Black supporting cast will make this a hit with fans of Jasmine Guillory and Tia Williams. (July)This review has been updated to remove a spoiler.

Booklist Review

Pride showed a gift for vivid character building in the novels We Are Not Like Them (2021) and You Were Always Mine (2023), both coauthored by Jo Piazza. Her first solo endeavor introduces dear protagonist Cora, who starts college at the dawn of the new millennium. She and her single dad, a teacher, were always an unstoppable, bookish duo, but Cora arrived at adulthood with no dating experience. That quickly changes when Cora meets Lincoln, her true sweetheart, who has drive and sees a future for them. Cora's girlfriends support her through the woes of a young romance, but heartache ensues, as does a connection with a dreamy artist penpal, Aaron. The book jumps ahead to the 2020s, with Cora again faced with these same suitors from her formative years. What have the decades taught Cora about partnership? What decisions do we make at 20 that affect the course of the rest of our lives? Pride's novel also seems to say there is no better time to learn how to love than in early adulthood.HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Pride and Piazza's novels made big waves and lots of best-of lists; readers will be amped to see Pride's first solo-authored novel.