Given Our History

It’s back-to-school season, fall is almost here, and that makes it the perfect time to read Kristyn J. Miller‘s new novel, Given Our History. This dual-timeline, second chance romance is about two history professors (and former best friends) who haven’t spoken in several years but are now back in each other’s orbit. Clara and Teddy met at a summer camp for homeschooled kids, bonding over a shared love of trivia, learning, and music. But something happened along the way, ruining their friendship. Now, with Clara applying for tenure at the college where she teaches history, Teddy is a visiting professor and sharing her office space. Can the two reclaim their friendship and finally get a chance at the romance that was brewing between them?

Tropes & Narrative Devices:

• Second chance romance
• Friends to lovers
• Slow burn
• Dual timeline
• First-person POV (from Clara only)

What I Liked:

• School setting and autumn vibes. Back to school and the beginning of fall… this is my favorite time of year, and these themes are what first drew me to Given Our History. As a proud nerd myself, I love books with an academic setting and characters falling in love to the backdrop of textbooks and writing essays. Here, however, Clara and Teddy are actually college professors, not students. And when they were younger, they never attended a school together; they were both homeschooled and met at a yearly camp. I love how they bonded over trivia and history and both went on to teach history. Cute and smart!
• 2000s punk/emo music! Look, my favorite music is and will always be the alternative and rock that came out of the 2000s. Teddy is a fan of My Chemical Romance as a teen, and soon enough, Clara loves their music, too. I enjoyed seeing these two teens bond over a shared love of emo music and continue loving this band nearly 20 years later. They’re my kind of people!
• Friendships and family relationships. This is a romance, first and foremost, but I love the way it builds up various kinds of relationships. Clara and Teddy start off as friends, sharing their loves for history and My Chemical Romance with each other. It gradually blooms into something closer to romantic love for them. This book also explores Clara’s friendships both as a teen and now as a college professor, her relationship with her much younger sister Reagan, and both Clara and Teddy’s relationships with their respective parents. The world in Given Our History feels full and realistic, with the ebbs and flows of real life.

What Didn’t Work for Me:

• It’s a bit too gradual and gentle. On the one hand, I think the pacing here works really well and helps the whole world feel that much more believable. However, it doesn’t go for a big climax. I think something a bit more eventful near the end would have added to the impact of this novel.

Final Thoughts

Given Our History is a lovely novel about friends, second chances, and finding romance amidst history books and pop punk music. I related to these characters in many ways and enjoyed getting to know them, both as teens in the 2000s and as thirty-something adults today. This is a wonderful read, especially as autumn begins. I’ll be looking out for more books from Kristyn J. Miller!

Special thanks to St. Martin’s Press and NetGalley for providing me with an ARC of this book!

Get the Book

You can buy Given Our History here – it’s available as a paperback, ebook, and audiobook.

Given Our History by Kristyn J. Miller
Audience	Adult
Genre	Contemporary Romance
Setting	Maryland
Number of Pages	320
Format I Read	Ebook (NetGalley ARC)
Original Publication Date	August 27, 2024
Publisher	St. Martin’s Griffin

Official Summary

In this sparkling romance, two professors with a complicated past get a second chance to prove history won’t repeat itself.

Assistant professor Clara Fernsby is nothing if not driven. She’s wanted to teach history since she was fourteen, and she hasn’t let anything stand in her way—not even the love of her life. And it all paid off in the end, because she landed a well-paid position at a private liberal arts college fresh out of grad school, and this year, she’s finally up for tenure.

When Theodore Harrison is brought on for the fall semester as a visiting scholar, it’s an unexpected blast from Clara’s past. She hasn’t spoken to Teddy since rejecting him over a phone call ten years ago. Now that he’s here, she’s reminded of their time together at every turn: autumns spent at a sleepaway camp in the Blue Ridge Mountains, trading battered history books and burned CDs with the quiet, dark-haired boy she once fell in love with.

That boy might’ve been her best friend, but the man teaching HIST-322 is a total stranger—or so she thinks. As they spend evenings working on a shared project and brainstorming over drinks at a college bar, Clara realizes she’s at risk of falling all over again. Given their history, she knows there’s every chance he’s not interested. But history’s all down to interpretation, and this time around, she’s got no intentions of repeating it.