--- product_id: 261016358 title: "If He Had Been with Me: A Heartbreaking Romance of First Love and Loss" price: "VT4297" currency: VUV in_stock: true reviews_count: 13 url: https://www.desertcart.vu/products/261016358-if-he-had-been-with-me-a-heartbreaking-romance-first store_origin: VU region: Vanuatu --- # Bestseller status Young adult fiction 320 pages If He Had Been with Me: A Heartbreaking Romance of First Love and Loss **Price:** VT4297 **Availability:** ✅ In Stock ## Summary > 📚 Love, Loss, and Everything In Between - Don't Miss Out! ## Quick Answers - **What is this?** If He Had Been with Me: A Heartbreaking Romance of First Love and Loss - **How much does it cost?** VT4297 with free shipping - **Is it available?** Yes, in stock and ready to ship - **Where can I buy it?** [www.desertcart.vu](https://www.desertcart.vu/products/261016358-if-he-had-been-with-me-a-heartbreaking-romance-first) ## Best For - Customers looking for quality international products ## Why This Product - Free international shipping included - Worldwide delivery with tracking - 15-day hassle-free returns ## Key Features - • **Emotional Depth:** Explore themes of longing, loss, and self-discovery. - • **Captivating Prose:** Engaging writing that keeps you turning pages. - • **Cultural Resonance:** Connect with a story that speaks to the millennial experience. - • **A Heartfelt Journey:** Dive into a poignant tale of love and friendship. - • **Relatable Characters:** Experience the ups and downs of adolescence. ## Overview If He Had Been with Me is a captivating young adult novel that explores the complexities of friendship and love through the eyes of two childhood friends, Autumn and Finny, as they navigate their senior year of high school. With its relatable characters and emotional depth, this bestseller resonates with readers seeking a heartfelt story. ## Description More than ONE MILLION copies sold! A BookTok Viral Sensation #1 New York Times Bestseller A USA TODAY Bestseller An achingly authentic and raw portrait of love, regret, and the life-altering impact of the relationships we hold closest to us, this YA romance bestseller is perfect for fans of Colleen Hoover, Jenny Han, and Lynn Painter. If he had been with me, everything would have been different… Autumn and Finn used to be inseparable. But then something changed. Or they changed. Now, they do their best to ignore each other. Autumn has her boyfriend Jamie, and her close-knit group of friends. And Finn has become that boy at school, the one everyone wants to be around. That still doesn't stop the way Autumn feels every time she and Finn cross paths, and the growing, nagging thought that maybe things could have been different. Maybe they should be together. But come August, things will change forever. And as time passes, Autumn will be forced to confront how else life might have been different if they had never parted ways… Captivating and heartbreaking, If He Had Been with Me is perfect for readers looking for: Contemporary teen romance books Unputdownable & bingeworthy novels Complex emotional YA stories TikTok Books Jenny Han fans Colleen Hoover fans Review: I fell in love with this book - Finn and Autumn were the best of friends until middle school. That's when they seemed to grow apart. Finn was with the popular crowd and Autumn was with the not-so-popular crowd. Their moms were still friends and they were still neighbors, so they saw each other most days. Autumn has Jaime now and they have been going out for practically forever. So what if she feels a pang in her chest when she looks at Finn. She's happy with her new friends and her new life...right? Love this book. This will most likely be my favorite for the year. Laura Nowling just gets it. Everything is just completely brilliant in this novel. The characters are totally great and the story is heartbreaking and just so honest. "I want to savour this wonder, this happening of loving a book and reading it for the first time, because the first time is always the best, and I will never read this book for the first time ever again." She also totally gets being a reader. It always draws me into the book when the character is a big reader too. Finn and Autumn were the best characters. I always wanted a friend like Finn. I wanted that kind of easy friendship where the line between two people is blurred. It was devastating to me to see them not together. I could feel the pull in Autumn's chest each time she saw Finn. Even though she was happy with her other friends and Jaime, she wasn't as happy as she could be. Her heart still wanted more. It crazy how such a small little thing could drive people apart without them even realizing why. A simple miscommunication and two lives are left incomplete. It's awful, but I'm sure it happens all the time. Jaime was an okay character. I think I loved Finn too much to really give Jaime a chance. It seemed a little bit mean at times, but nothing too bad. He just wasn't a good fit for Autumn's eccentricity. Their little group seemed to function like any group of friends and they all seemed to work okay together. The only bit that I wasn't crazy about is when we read Autumn's story that she wrote. She was supposedly this really wonderful author, but the story was fairly juvenile. It wasn't bad it was just kind of basic and plain. This book is everything I want my realistic fiction to be. Just beautiful and honest. I knew how it was going to end early one, you kind of know from the first few pages. Regardless, you are still wishing and hoping that the outcome isn't what it seems to be. It was awful in a good way--in a I don't ever want this book to end kind of way. It made me laugh, it made me bawl my eyes out, it made my chest hurt and it made me close the book and immediately want to pick it up and start from the very beginning. It made me feel everything as if it was my own story. First Line: "I wasn't with Finny on that August night, but my imagination has burned the scene in my mind so that it feels like a memory." Favorite Lines: "No one is perfect." "'I think we're supposed to experience as much beauty as we can.'" "The icy wind burns through my gloves and my fingers ache until they fall numb and silent." "I can feel them in my mouth like three smooth pebbles." Review: This is the kind of book that walks in looking gentle and then quietly starts rearranging your ribs. - It’s emotional, reflective, and it pulls you into that ache of “what if.” The nostalgic tone and the way it captures complicated closeness. It’s very feelings forward, and if you’ve ever had a relationship that lived in the in between, it hits. It also nails that bittersweet, dreamy sadness that makes you want to text someone you haven’t talked to in years. It leans introspective, so if you need plot driven pacing, it may feel slow at points. Some moments also rely on emotional inevitability rather than surprise. A tender, haunting read for fans of emotional coming of age and "what could have been" stories. ## Technical Specifications | Specification | Value | |---------------|-------| | Best Sellers Rank | #1,886 in Books ( See Top 100 in Books ) #6 in Teen & Young Adult Fiction on Dating & Sex (Books) #9 in Teen & Young Adult Friendship Fiction #27 in Teen & Young Adult Contemporary Romance | | Customer Reviews | 4.2 out of 5 stars 63,364 Reviews | ## Images ![If He Had Been with Me: A Heartbreaking Romance of First Love and Loss - Image 1](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/813yHPADcjL.jpg) ## Customer Reviews ### ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ I fell in love with this book *by B***N on June 26, 2013* Finn and Autumn were the best of friends until middle school. That's when they seemed to grow apart. Finn was with the popular crowd and Autumn was with the not-so-popular crowd. Their moms were still friends and they were still neighbors, so they saw each other most days. Autumn has Jaime now and they have been going out for practically forever. So what if she feels a pang in her chest when she looks at Finn. She's happy with her new friends and her new life...right? Love this book. This will most likely be my favorite for the year. Laura Nowling just gets it. Everything is just completely brilliant in this novel. The characters are totally great and the story is heartbreaking and just so honest. "I want to savour this wonder, this happening of loving a book and reading it for the first time, because the first time is always the best, and I will never read this book for the first time ever again." She also totally gets being a reader. It always draws me into the book when the character is a big reader too. Finn and Autumn were the best characters. I always wanted a friend like Finn. I wanted that kind of easy friendship where the line between two people is blurred. It was devastating to me to see them not together. I could feel the pull in Autumn's chest each time she saw Finn. Even though she was happy with her other friends and Jaime, she wasn't as happy as she could be. Her heart still wanted more. It crazy how such a small little thing could drive people apart without them even realizing why. A simple miscommunication and two lives are left incomplete. It's awful, but I'm sure it happens all the time. Jaime was an okay character. I think I loved Finn too much to really give Jaime a chance. It seemed a little bit mean at times, but nothing too bad. He just wasn't a good fit for Autumn's eccentricity. Their little group seemed to function like any group of friends and they all seemed to work okay together. The only bit that I wasn't crazy about is when we read Autumn's story that she wrote. She was supposedly this really wonderful author, but the story was fairly juvenile. It wasn't bad it was just kind of basic and plain. This book is everything I want my realistic fiction to be. Just beautiful and honest. I knew how it was going to end early one, you kind of know from the first few pages. Regardless, you are still wishing and hoping that the outcome isn't what it seems to be. It was awful in a good way--in a I don't ever want this book to end kind of way. It made me laugh, it made me bawl my eyes out, it made my chest hurt and it made me close the book and immediately want to pick it up and start from the very beginning. It made me feel everything as if it was my own story. First Line: "I wasn't with Finny on that August night, but my imagination has burned the scene in my mind so that it feels like a memory." Favorite Lines: "No one is perfect." "'I think we're supposed to experience as much beauty as we can.'" "The icy wind burns through my gloves and my fingers ache until they fall numb and silent." "I can feel them in my mouth like three smooth pebbles." ### ⭐⭐⭐⭐ This is the kind of book that walks in looking gentle and then quietly starts rearranging your ribs. *by L***A on March 25, 2026* It’s emotional, reflective, and it pulls you into that ache of “what if.” The nostalgic tone and the way it captures complicated closeness. It’s very feelings forward, and if you’ve ever had a relationship that lived in the in between, it hits. It also nails that bittersweet, dreamy sadness that makes you want to text someone you haven’t talked to in years. It leans introspective, so if you need plot driven pacing, it may feel slow at points. Some moments also rely on emotional inevitability rather than surprise. A tender, haunting read for fans of emotional coming of age and "what could have been" stories. ### ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ heartrending but definitely on the sweeter side of bitter-sweet *by B***B on January 15, 2016* "Like all things that have become history, I now feel as if I always knew it, as if all through this story, it had been lurking in the shadows. The story underneath the story." This F'ing book!! It gave me a bad bout of depression laced with a hint of bipolar disorder then hope and ultimately sadness and curiosity...damn unresolved ending...Is she or isn't she??? I moped around the house while reading this book from the very first page and it wasn't until about 90(ish)% done that I started to feel anything other than despair and frustration. The beginning of the book starts off letting us know that a horrible thing will occur. So yeah, we were warned but waiting for it to come to pass was agonizingly slow (and slightly annoying) mainly because I wanted to smack Autumn (the quirky/beautiful MC) throughout the entire book. How blind can someone be to the fact that all your hopes and dreams are not only possible but completely within your grasp if you just get out of your own head and OPEN YOUR EYES??? "Finny, my Finny, kissed me. It was horrible. It was strange and wonderful. It felt like I was watching a meteor shower and did not know if it meant the stars were falling and the sky was breaking apart." The two main characters (Autumn and Finny) are EXTREMELY well formed. They are 3 dimensional, robust and without a doubt savory. Their relationship is exquisitely complex and undeniably beautiful. I manically kept watch on the page count. I wished desperately that I could freeze the moment and live within it a bit longer while simultaneously devouring each page because I just HAD to know what happened next....I read in bed. I read in front of the TV. I read in the bathroom and in the car BUT when I got to the end I cursed this freaking book because it was an unsatisfying (semi) Cliffy :-( Damn book! This heartbreaking, Coming of Age story deftly highlights how subjective our life experiences are. The writing is emotive, the characters and world building are excellently crafted and the sentiment is poignant and tragically beautiful. I think we all can relate to the cast of teens (and the Mothers as well) as they face the horrible truths of Adulthood. There are a host of Coming of Age realizations and each one made me feel like I was welcoming home an old, friendly pain that had slowly become inconspicuous by blending into the background din of Adulthood. Sound dramatic and fatalistic?? It does and this book has enormous amounts of both but the underlying sweet innocence of it all is heartrending and definitely on the sweeter side of bitter-sweet. I picked this book because I wanted to feel something. I wanted to feel something profoundly and this book delivered. My heart is still aching. ## Frequently Bought Together - If He Had Been with Me - If Only I Had Told Her - Girl in Pieces --- ## Why Shop on Desertcart? - 🛒 **Trusted by 1.3+ Million Shoppers** — Serving international shoppers since 2016 - 🌍 **Shop Globally** — Access 737+ million products across 21 categories - 💰 **No Hidden Fees** — All customs, duties, and taxes included in the price - 🔄 **15-Day Free Returns** — Hassle-free returns (30 days for PRO members) - 🔒 **Secure Payments** — Trusted payment options with buyer protection - ⭐ **TrustPilot Rated 4.5/5** — Based on 8,000+ happy customer reviews **Shop now:** [https://www.desertcart.vu/products/261016358-if-he-had-been-with-me-a-heartbreaking-romance-first](https://www.desertcart.vu/products/261016358-if-he-had-been-with-me-a-heartbreaking-romance-first) --- *Product available on Desertcart Vanuatu* *Store origin: VU* *Last updated: 2026-05-21*