For those who enjoy stories of long-term friendship that blossoms into love, here’s one to consider. The outline is familiar – poor girl and rich boy find love, are doomed by disapproving family, Love eventually Conquers All. Happily, the author layers this framework with enough texture to make the conventional story worth another look. At Last has a somewhat uneven start, but the richly nuanced final act makes it all worthwhile.

We first meet young Gracie Taylor running away from her wedding, her hometown, and from Noah Chase, the love of her life. Then we backtrack to Gracie and Noah in kindergarten. We spend many chapters with Gracie at five, motherless and insecure. Gracie’s mother died in a car crash and she’s raised by her alcoholic father Ben and cranky grandmother. Noah’s mother is her main source of maternal affection. Noah’s father Simon, however, clearly loathes Gracie, and has little warmth for lonely Noah. There’s bad blood between Ben and Simon over Gracie’s mother, and neither father can forgive either child for it.

Noah is sent to boarding school in the first grade, and the bond between the kids is severed until Noah comes home for a summer at 17. He’s become quite the bad boy; meanwhile Gracie is hardworking, ambitious, and determined to become a veterinarian. They meet again and fall rapidly in love. When they decide to get married, however, Simon learns of their plans and manages to provoke Gracie into running away. The romance is over until circumstances bring both Gracie and Noah back home, eight years later. The final third of the book shows them older and wiser, cautiously reaching for each other but afraid to be hurt again.

There’s a lot to like in this book. The children are all fairly realistic, neither overwhelmingly cute nor tiny tykes with PhDs. Adult Gracie’s playful interaction with a child is adorable but also believable. However, the kids are all intensely self-conscious and reflective, which is a capacity that children simply don’t develop until they’re a few years older. Compared to the child-sized caricatures in many books, it’s a minor issue, but it did repeatedly pull me out of the story to hear the thoughts of these world-weary five-year-olds.

Gracie and Noah’s young love is nicely depicted, and in an interesting twist it’s Noah who’s romantic and Gracie who’s grounded and cautious. I would have liked a closer examination of their emotional bonds at five and seventeen, but I could really feel their mutual attraction, and the conflicting emotions it caused, in the final third of the book.

I was very emotionally engaged by these characters, but ironically, this led to some disappointment when my raised expectations were unevenly met. Cartoony villains in a lesser romance are one thing; if the story is entertaining enough I may breeze past them. But in this case, the characters were so fully realized that their internal contradictions really bothered me. We’re asked to buy into not one but two fathers so cold that they carry lifetime grudges against the innocent babies in their homes. And yet both men have their good sides as well, and the good aspects are convincing enough to make their unreasoning hatred very hard to swallow. Similarly, for many years Gracie and Noah are hurt by the inaction of a good but weak-willed character, and this indirect cruelty simply didn’t ring true measured against the character’s overall goodness. The book eventually offers well-considered reasons for some of these inconsistencies. But in too many instances, I found myself thinking “I suppose somebody could act that way, but….” Real humans are imperfect and often inconsistent, but in many cases these contradictions were pushed to the limits of what I could find believable.

Overall, however, this is a richly textured book that develops a theme very dear to my heart – we are not doomed to repeat all of our parents’ mistakes on our own children. My own parents didn’t, and I’m eternally grateful for it and humbled by their love. By the end it’s clear that Noah and Gracie can both transcend their neglected childhoods and nurture their own family in a home lit by love; on that level I could hardly ask for more.