Lovely story spanning 15 or so years, I enjoyed it, and loved the characters of Ella and Lowe. Laura Dockrill's writing is brilliant and can really capture a time, a place and people, I really enjoyed that part of it and the storytelling.

But maybe a little out of the target age range for it.

Elle is the very epitome of teenage anguish- in love but too unsure of herself to allow anything beyond her carefully constructed friendship zone she falls hard for Lowe and a beautiful friendship of letter writing and mix tape editing ensues. However Elle soon feels left behind as Lowe finds fame with his band and disappears out of her orbit into the world of stardom, his name linked with woman after woman.
Jumping between teen Elle and her now in her 30's, Lowe swings in and out of her life, sometime unwelcome but never far from her mind.
Not your average boy meets girl- the feelings leap of the page through out the 15 or so years the story spans

I rarely choose to read romantic novels and admit I was only drawn to this book by the beautiful cover and unusual title but, oh boy, I am so very pleased I was chosen to receive an ARC of this wonderfully nostalgic and touching book.
Ella’s story is told over two time frames which works brilliantly. It’s a slow burn but page turning ‘one more chapter’ read. The amazingly detailed description of teenage love and angst were so well written, and I loved all of Ella’s family and lifelong friendships. Even though this coming of age was a few decades after mine, I could totally relate to it and amongst the unrequited love there were many laugh out loud moments.

I really enjoyed this book. I’m still thinking about it a few days on and I know this beautifully written and memorable story will stay with me for a very long time.

Ella and Lowe are 14 when they meet. Ella is quick to friendzone herself even though she has never beem more attracted to anyone. She doesn't imagine she has a chance with attractive, talented Lowe. Over the years they develop a close friendship which lasts through Lowe and his band becoming famous. 30 year old Ella is engaged to Jackson and has lost touch with Lowe. Can she get back in touch? Will she find the same sensitive kind boy she once knew? And will the time ever be right for romance to blossom. A reminder of the angst of young love and teenage uncertainty. #netgalley #IloveyouIloveyouIloveyou

Oh how this book made my heart happy and sad and laugh and cry and feel all the things. A really witty quick smart lead and a hopeless bloke who can’t get his act together 😂 l love love loved the combo of them both and was willing them to make it happen at sooo many points. I felt fully involved throughout their story and the ending was just perfect. Thank you Laura HQ for access to the eARC, I thoroughly enjoyed it! 💜✨

Reading this book is a delight, with a very carefree writing voice, easy to read, also brings back lots of memories of the 2000s, so many nostalgic references. On first love, this book capture the story and the emotions so well, one of my most enjoyable romance I have read.

Thank you Netgalley for this ARC!

I was thoroughly fascinated by this book! It's a delightful slow burn, filled with the classic "will they or won't they" tension and an endearing friends-to-lovers storyline. The story is infused with the energy of the early 2000s that will take you on an emotional rollercoaster.

This novel follows Ella and her best friend, Lowe, from their teenage years to their thirties. The novel portrays their bond so authentically and relatable that I felt every moment, every argument, and every almost-kiss. Their connection throughout the years had me reading rapidly, eager for the conclusion.

The only reason this is not a five-star review is that there were parts that seemed to be longer than necessary for my preferences. However, this could have been my impatience in wanting to discover the outcome—make of that what you will!

i received this book as an ARC but i believe it’s been released now !! (thank you @netgalley)
it just took me forever to get to it 🤭🤭

so i’d like to preface this by saying i am not typically a romance reader, but something about this book just drew me in !!

firstly, this book is giving one day meets angus, thongs and perfect snogging meets bridget jones’ diary 💝 the way dockrill writes being a teenage girl is so perfectly done and made me feel so nostalgic and reflected the entire way through. she just hits the nail on the head with girlhood, female friendships and teenage crushes.

lowe, the mmc, was just so adorable and angsty, i was so in love with him through ella’s eyes. everything she found endearing i did too, which is a credit to dockrill’s writing.

i do really recommend this! it was fast-paced, relatable and made me CRY 😭😭😭

i know my girl ella would’ve listened to the prophecy by taylor in her bedroom and SOBBED if she’d had TTPD when she was a teen💔💔

3.75 stars
💝💝💝

I received an advance review copy for free, and I am leaving this review voluntarily.


I Love You, I Love You, I Love You by Laura Dockrill is the story of Elle and Lowe who meet as tenagers in 2000.

Over the next fourteen years they become close but as their lives go indifferent directions it is better to love each other from afar.

Although I Love You, I Love You, I Love, tells the story of the relationship Between Ella and Low, the story is told entirely through Ella’s perspective only, the novel has two timelines through one in the present day and another starting from 2000, moving to the present.

What I like about the way that Laura Dockrill executed the division in timelines throughout the novel is that the change only happened at the start of the chapters.

In addition to the timeline only changing at the start of chapters the story stayed on the time period for more than one chapter, this allows readers to really get to grips with what is happening in the story without flip flopping all the time.

The one thing that worried me as I started to get into I Love You, I Love You, I Love You came from the plot and the choices of the writer. Firstly the whole story is told from one perspective and that person is a teenager at the start of the novel.

The Second thing was the pilot line of the novel being told over 14 years is that the novel would be full of woe is me angst.

Yes there was a time when this could have been the case however, Laura Dockrill’s writing while at times could have gone over the top particularly at the start when Ella the narrator of the story was 14, this never happened.

While a novel that is only told through one perspective, other characters can lack depth as we only see one perspective, however the Elle’s family, and friend group outside of Lowe had enough distinction to at least recognize them as the came and went in the story.

As for the love of Elle’s life Lowe, yes he is put on pedestal and seems to be the perfect male for Elle at least, although there was never a time that this love feast was over the top, which could have happened as the story is told from one perspective.

While a number of reviews say that this is a perfect novel for the specific generation who were teenages at the dawn of the millennium and yes they will get a lot of the specific references, that may go over the heads if you are of a different generation.

However the craft that I Love You, I Love You, I Love You by Laura Dockrill is written makes this a must read for anyone who has had a first love..

I enjoyed this book but found it didn’t grip me.

Ella is 14 when she meets Lowe and she certainly likes him but they end up as friends. We see over the years how they interact being on the phone to each other and when older occasionally sending texts. They end up with different people where we thought they might get together. It was always a case of will they won’t they.

I thought the book could have been a bit shorter the best bit where I wanted to know what happened was at the end I kept reading on to find out.

The characters were likeable and certainly worked well together.

In this childhood friends to lovers book, we follow Ella and Lowe as they meet as teenagers and grow up together in the early 2000s. This book was heavily nostalgic for me, with lots references to things I had forgotten existed. Reading from Ella’s first crush and her navigating all the feeling surrounding growing up all the way till adulthood was a very special experience. This book makes you experience all the highs and lows of life in such a short space of time. It’s truly impressive how the author was able to write such an authentic and raw romance book.

This lovely romantic story spans two decades of an unrequited teenage crush. I found myself rooting for Ella and Lowe to communicate their obvious perfect match, but the suspense of "will they, won’t they" kept me hooked. The humor and poignancy, especially the cringy yet laugh-out-loud teenage moments.

I love you, I love you, I love you is primarily set over the summer of 2000 when Ella and her friends are 14 and Ella falls in love with Lowe. The novel then moves through the years, chronicling the ‘will they won’t they’ relationship between Ella and Lowe.
Although I’m over 15 years older than Ella I still found much to enjoy about a teenagers coming of age in the 2000s. Ella has a distinctive voice and her insights into life , love and her family are hilarious. I found myself laughing out loud more than once.
I did find that the storyline was a little drawn out and I became impatient for the ending but overall this was an enjoyable read.
Many thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the opportunity to read and review this digital ARC.
3.5 stars

📚 review 📚
i love you i love you i love you - laura dockrill


i knew this book and i would get on the moment the price of freddos were brought up. i thought life as a teen in the naughties was behind me but this brought it all back. in fact, this might be the one day for those of us who grew up in a time where you either used the phone or the internet, a time where mobile phones were few and far between and you actually got charged if your texts were too long. this is a book about millennials for millennials by a millennial. it’s like looking at a photograph from my last years at secondary school.

i’ve always enjoyed laura dockrill’s writing and her adult debut is no exception, i love you i love you i love you is immersive, heartbreaking, funny and bittersweet. it’s a romance that feels very different to the romances ive read recently, it has the feel of something more literary whilst still capturing the angst of being a teenager in love and a thirty something having an existential crisis. it’s a second and third chance romance that’s so relatable it hurts at times. it is maybe a little too long, so we have a lot of pining but i think this might be one of those books that never falls out of style and would make the perfect summer time read - now and in the future.

thank you @netgalley for the early copy

I really hate to DNF this, but this is not my cup of tea AT ALL. This is not an inherently negative review, i am just not the target audience for this book and want to make sure others are aware of that. This book was wayyyy to cringey millennial for me, the self deprecating “humour” on every single page was really irritating me. It didn’t come off as funny as authentic, just whiney and cringe. The writing felt like reading someone’s messy internal monologue, and there was nothing in the plot to keep me interested.

A lovely romantic story about an unrequited teenage crush that continues over two decades. It made me want to shout and scream at Ella and Lowe for not communicating what the readers and their friends could see was a perfect love match but then the “will they, won’t they” suspense is at the heart of what makes the story so relateable and compelling. It is funny and poignant and the description of the teenage attempts to get a boyfriend at the garden centre was both cringy and laugh out loud. It brought back memories of silly teenage moments of my own to be honest.

A huge thank you to NetGalley for the opportunity to read this sweet and funny masterpiece.

Laura Dockrill is best known as a children's writer and that shows in this ‘will they won't they, yes of course they will’ romance.

Ella Cole, the central character, is drunk at a wedding at the start of the book which then flashes back to when she was fourteen, full of anxieties and doubts and apparently unable to say what she feels to anyone. She is meant to be that typical teenager for whom everything goes wrong, so when she meets the love of her life, Lowe, she ends up being his friend instead of his lover.

That confusion is maintained throughout the story and even while Lowe becomes famous and Ella gets engaged they still can't have an honest conversation. They even share the same bed on one occasion!

Eventually, there is the dramatic moment at a big party where everything gets put right which will probably make a feel-good film at some point in the future but, by then, it's really quite hard to care.

Although this is a book which knows its market and heads straight for the jugular, there's a sense in which Ella Cole goes from scatty and likeable to something else. She agrees to marry someone who she doesn't love but can't tell the person she does love how she feels, and the escapades with her friends seem to go on a little too long. Maybe she just needs to grow up!

Loved this and couldn't put it down. Very nostalgic - brought back memories from my youth, lots of things that rang a bell. Really gets you involved in the story. A great read.

There was so much I enjoyed about this book, that I was disappointed that I ultimately couldn't love it. Some of the early sections dealing with Ella and her schoolfriends reminded me powerfully of an adult version of the Angus, Thongs... series (this is the highest compliment, by the way), and I also enjoyed how Dockrill portrayed the sense of millennial ennui when you gaze around at a life - still renting in our 30s, still not feeling settled into a career or a family - that doesn't resemble the ones we were told we'd have. However, I struggled to engage with the slow-burning will-they, won't-they romance with Lowe, which (given it's the point of the book) left me feeling somewhat unsatisfied.

I really enjoyed this and couldn't put it down. Normally I find the unrequited love story really frustrating, but this was deftly handled. There were still moments where I wanted to shake one of the leads (or both, in some cases), but there was always other plot twists happening to keep the momentum moving. Also some lovely life lessons, like its all about timing. Both parties have to be in the same space. And if its meant to be ...

Ella and Lowe meet as teenagers and for her, it’s love at first sight. But she is young and insecure and chooses the safe route. Even though the electricity is obvious for all her friends to see. Then life gets in the way. Lowe is talented and charismatic and find success with his band. Ella follows the more traditional route, copywriting until she can build up the courage to finish her book. Their paths keep crossing but the timing never seems right.

A love story worth reading!