The Truth About Love by Josephine Hart
Addition: Review paperback
Rating: 1/5
Synopsis:
It’s dangerous …and that’s the truth about love …A young man shields his terrible wounds from his mother; a husband believes he can love his grief-stricken wife back to life; a young girl puts her own life on hold until her family can find their way back from blinding pain; a man surrenders to the helplessness of obsessive love. Set in Ireland, this brilliant, intense story is about a family named O’Hara who chose to remain in the place of their loss, and the stranger from Germany who has run from his. It’s about love – for another, for a country, for family – and survival, and it’s remarkable.
I have decided to put this book down because I am finding it boring. To be honest, I was put off by the first chapter but kept going anyway – only to decide a third of the way in to lay aside this book. The first couple of chapters are the thoughts of a boy who has just had a serious accident. His thoughts don’t flow coherently and I struggled to follow what was going on. Later on the narrative become more coherent, but I still didn’t really know what was going on. There was a whole conversation about a gate and a chess game with a bishop where I just didn’t know who or what they were talking about. I found this not to be a book about love but a book about death, and it made for morbid reading. I don’t really like “literary novels” anyway, and this is certainly one.
I couldn’t relate to the characters or the story lines either. I haven’t experienced hardships like the ones in the book and I don’t have a past I’m running from, and the way Hart wrote the characters made it hard to feel empathy – or anything really, in regards to them. Instead I felt lost, bored and a bit depressed.
I had high hopes for this book, but the book just did not live up to expectations and has been put aside. I want to thank BookRabbit for sending me this copy, and to say sorry I didn’t finish this book, it just wasn’t for me.
