All great love stories are haunted houses. L.F. Peterson's Almost Love stands among them - - not as gothic romance, but as a forensic study of the specters we shelter in our ribs. Through Margaret Winters' 20-year lens, we're shown love's most dangerous isotope: the kind that never decays because it never truly lived. This is literature as emotional taxidermy - - the art of preserving what should have decomposed. Peterson stitches together the sinew of near-misses: hands almost held, confessions swallowed like struck matches, a lifetime spent curating absence. The genius lies in making us feel the weight of doors never opened, the gravitational pull of might-have-beens that warp entire decades. Structural Brilliance The novel's twin pillars - - decaying architecture and undeveloped film - - form a symbiotic metaphor. Abandoned theaters become darkrooms where Margaret develops her longing: "I could develop ghosts in that light," she remarks while photographing the Orpheum's ruins. Each crumbling venue serves as a mausoleum for the self she might've been had she loved less cautiously. Literary Kin - The obsessive restraint of Kawabata's Snow Country - The spatial poetics of Anne Michaels' Fugitive Pieces (rooms as memory vessels) - Joan Didion's surgical precision applied to romantic pathology Yet Peterson carves new territory. Each chapter a frame capturing some vital erosion: "We don't fall in love - - we're conscripted. The heart makes soldiers of us all." This is more than a story about unrequited love. It's about the stories we self-immolate to keep warm. The fairy tale of someday. The alibi of timing. The addiction to emotional chiaroscuro. The safer thrill of shadows over light When Margaret finally attends Daniel's coastal wedding, Peterson doesn't give us catharsis but calcified clarity. The real tragedy isn't losing him - - it's realizing she'd built a religion around an empty altar. The ocean-side ceremony becomes her Rubicon: "Saltwater is just time liquefied. We drown in what we won't let go." This novel deserves recognition for: 1. Psychological Verisimilitude - Makes Normal People read like melodrama. 2. Metaphoric Discipline - Every image services the central paradox: how we monumentize emotional absences. 3. Temporal Innovation - Flits between timelines like a darkroom timer, exposing how memory develops in chemical baths of regret. Final Frame Almost Love isn't a warning about love's risks, but an elegy for the greater crime: the lives we don't live. Peterson constructs the masterpiece like Margaret composes photographs - - finding terrible beauty in abandonment's afterimage, teaching us sometimes survival means developing our regrets to see what they really are: undeveloped futures.