Nobody performs Bernie Bird alone. A puppeteer with one arm up inside the head and the other buried in the bird’s left hand has run out of arms, so a second person kneels beside her, slides an arm into the right hand, and becomes that hand for as long as the camera runs. No signal passes between them. They simply know. Beverly Lark has been doing this since she was small enough to sit on her grandfather’s workshop floor, and it is the single most revealing fact about her, because Love Felt Like This by Julie Olivia spends four hundred pages on a woman who will pour her savings, her sleep and her whole nervous system into a show that literally cannot be performed by one person, while refusing every offer of help that arrives anywhere else in her life.
The Two-Person Bird at the Heart of Love Felt Like This
That image is the whole argument of Love Felt Like This by Julie Olivia, and it keeps returning.
Beverly bought the rights to Birds on the Block after the nonprofit that made it collapsed. It was her grandfather’s show. She has a mentor in his seventies, Finch, who was his other half on camera for decades and who is a flawless right hand. She has a family who run a pancake house and would drop everything. And she has, by the middle of the book, a rock star sleeping in her grandmother’s garage apartment who keeps asking what he can do.
She turns almost all of it down. Not rudely, and not with any drama. She just quietly does the work at four in the morning instead, and the novel is patient enough to let that read as a flaw rather than a virtue.
Griffin Harvey Is Not the Rock Star You Are Expecting
The male lead could very easily have been a type, and he is not.
Griffin is bulky, tattooed, monosyllabic in interviews and famous enough that a cancelled bus route makes the news. He is also raising a two-year-old by himself after her mother died, hiding her from the public entirely, and carrying a band, a manager and a label who all depend on him deciding what happens next. His album is stalled because the songs he is writing want a piano and he has been sold to the world as a guitar player.
Love Felt Like This by Julie Olivia gives him the same disease it gives Beverly. He is generous with everyone and will not let a single person carry anything for him.
What Love Felt Like This Gets Right About Craft
The puppetry is the best-researched thing in the book and it shows on every page it appears.
There is real specificity here: how a puppet’s mouth is worked from inside the beak, how performers ride low wheeled stools and hold their arms above their heads for hours, how a two-hander is blocked so both operators stay in frame, and how you keep a character alive when it is idle rather than letting it go limp. The acknowledgements name working puppeteers and a television puppetry workshop, and anyone curious about that world can start with the Center for Puppetry Arts in Atlanta.
The songwriting scenes are nearly as good. Love Felt Like This by Julie Olivia is unusually convincing about the specific misery of knowing a piece is wrong and not yet knowing why.
Ava, and the Toddler Problem
Small children in romance are usually plot furniture. The one in Love Felt Like This by Julie Olivia is not.
Ava is two. She says four or five words, repeats them endlessly, and has strong feelings about pancakes. She does not deliver emotional insight to the adults. And she does not say the thing that fixes the third act. She wants to be carried, and she calls Beverly by a single letter, and the reason the romance works is that you can see exactly what Griffin stands to lose if this goes wrong for his daughter rather than for himself.
The fake-dating premise, by contrast, is almost incidental. It is established quickly, extended out of pure spite toward Beverly’s ex, and then largely forgotten while the book gets on with what it actually cares about.
Where Love Felt Like This Sags
Four things keep it off the very top shelf.
- The ex is a cardboard villain. Beau exists to be awful, and every scene he appears in tells you nothing you did not already know.
- The third act runs on a decision neither character believes in. It is well motivated and it still feels like a delay.
- The chapter titles are a stunt. Each one is printed with letters missing, which is charming twice and irritating by chapter thirty.
- It is long. Comfortably over four hundred pages, and the middle stretch of domestic bliss could lose fifty of them without anyone noticing.
None of that sinks it. Love Felt Like This by Julie Olivia is warm, funny and genuinely moving in its last eighty pages, and the two leads are people rather than positions.
Is Love Felt Like This a Standalone?
Yes, completely.
Love Felt Like This by Julie Olivia has no series, no returning cast and nothing you need to read first. Olivia has written connected books before, including the Never Harbor and Honeywood Fun Park sets, but the author’s note here is explicit that this one stands on its own. Readers who want more of her voice afterwards have several places to go and no required order.
The book is also openly a love letter to Jim Henson, from the epigraphs onward, and it wears that debt without embarrassment.
Content Notes for Love Felt Like This
Descriptive sex scenes and explicit language throughout. The off-page death of a young mother, and sustained grief around it. Parental abandonment and estrangement. Infidelity in the backstory, involving secondary characters rather than the leads. Alcohol use. A child photographed and discussed online without consent, plus organised online harassment directed at a woman for her association with a famous man. Illness in a toddler, and a brief scare around it. Love Felt Like This by Julie Olivia supplies its own list at the front, which is worth reading before you start.
Read it if / Skip it if
Read it if you want a romance where the jobs are real jobs and the research is visible; if you like a single-dad plot that respects the child; if slow-burn anticipation matters more to you than heat level.
Skip it if you need a tightly plotted book; if you want an antagonist with dimensions; if a third-act separation on a self-sacrificing decision is the thing that makes you close a novel.
Read these next
Five for readers who finish Love Felt Like This by Julie Olivia and want to stay in this register:
- If It Makes You Happy by Julie Olivia. Her other recent standalone, and the closest match in tone.
- Lost and Found by Tarah DeWitt. Two adults, one child neither expected, and a pretend arrangement that stops being pretend.
- The Future Saints by Ashley Winstead. For the band dynamic, played far darker.
- Wish You Were Her by Elle McNicoll. For what proximity to fame does to the person standing next to it.
- For the Record by Emma Lord. For the music industry handled with a lighter touch.
The Last Word
The scene that stays with me is not a kiss. It is a soundstage, months in, with four puppeteers sitting on wheeled stools at ankle height, arms straight up, rolling into frame together. Finch has one arm inside the bird and his free hand flat against Beverly’s back, steadying her, keeping the two of them travelling as a single unit so the character above them reads as one creature instead of two people struggling.
That is the whole novel in one shot. Beverly spends the book insisting she can hold the bird up by herself, and the job she loves most in the world is the one job that has never once let her. What Love Felt Like This by Julie Olivia finally argues, without ever saying it aloud, is that being somebody’s right hand is not a diminishment and asking for one is not a failure. It takes a slightly baggy four hundred pages to get there, and the last stretch earns every bit of it.
