Rowell is a great writer stylistically and she writes dialogue very well. I loved her voice as an author. I was so charmed by her writing I read this book over the course of an evening. 
 Unfortunately for all the wit and stylistic skill Rowell demonstrates here I found the substance of this book incredibly frustrating. This portrait of a marriage didn't work for me for a few reasons. The initial conflict frankly doesn't seem like much of a conflict at all. Georgie is presented with a once in a lifetime job opportunity that would necessitate working through a family Christmas. Neal is so offended by this he takes their children to his parents house and through his non-communication signals he thinks their marriage is in trouble. This is a pretty weak issue to present as a potentially marriage ending calamity. 
 For all the time spent chronicling their courtship from their first college meeting to the present I never really bought Georgie or Neal as a couple and I certainly didn't root for them to stay together. I never got what they saw in each other, particularly what Georgie saw in Neal. 
 Neal is presented as a perpetually disgruntled jerk who lashes out at his wife due to his own inadequacies. Neal resents Georgie's focus on her career and how her career forces him to live in California yet he has no direction or ambition himself. He is just generically unhappy yet unwilling to actually do the work of cultivating his own interests or developing himself as a person. Rowell also repeatedly discusses how Neal almost never laughs or smiles which is just weird and creepy. 
 Neal comes off so poorly in part because we don't get half the insight into him that we get into Georgie. Had the reader been granted the same degree of insight into his thoughts and feelings maybe his actions would have been more understandable and justifiable. We actually see very little of modern Neal and Georgie interacting with each other. There are vague references to fights/problems but we are told not shown the state of their marriage in 2013. We are told Neal is a fantastic father, which would have been another way to potentially humanize his character, but again we don't really see that in action. 
 As the book went on and Georgie got more and more desperate to mend her marriage, and more and more self-flagellating about her faults and how bad a wife she was I became increasingly uncomfortable as a reader because I didn't appreciate the book's suggestion that only Georgie is at fault for the nebulously defined marriage issues. Since 2013 Neal is giving Georgie the cold shoulder he is offscreen for a lot of the book so you never get into his headspace like you get into Georgie's. 
 The whole point of the book seems to be that Neal is right and Georgie is wrong and how dare she have a close male friend and a demanding career she is passionate about (that allows Neal to be a stay at home dad). Neal is never made to answer for his glaring faults as a husband (he is a mean, whiny passive aggressive sad sack who undeservedly resents his wife for her professional success) whereas Georgie spends a good part of the book raking herself over the coals for working long hours. Neal never displays self criticism or self reflection. I feel like my perception of Neal and Georgie as characters and their marriage is very different from the one Rowell wanted me to have. 
 I haven't discussed the fantastical element of the plot: modern day Georgie's telephone conversations with 1998 Neal. Rowell isn't overly concerned with the Sci-Fi/fantasy elements of the plot. The phone calls to the past are a device to provide exposition about Neal and Georgie's relationship and to trigger in Georgie various levels of angst about and love towards Neal. I thought the use of the phone calls to the past was a good plot device if you accept that Rowell is using it as a tool to introduce relevant plot and character information rather than a fully fleshed out concept in and of itself. 
 For all my many problems with this book there were some passages that blew me away with how well written they were. I could see so much potential in Rowell's writing. It is just unfortunate that this didn't really work for me on the whole.