Review by Booklist Review
Sometimes love hurts. In her first book, Australian writer Stephens' goal is to assure readers that they're not alone in their anguish over difficult relationships. She tells three alternating true stories. Ana is a married woman who falls in love with her husband's best friend. Claire manages to find new love after the hurtful end to her relationship with her partner, Maggie. Patrick has finally found his first love. These involving tales are based on real people (although Stephens admits to embellishing the details), and together they read, in part, like a romance novel filled with sexy scenes and raw emotions. All three couples are wildly in love and obsessed by their relationships. But a dark cloud hangs over this delirium, and soon passion gives way to conflict. It's painful, at times, to read this book, but in the epilogue, Stephens, who shares her own story of heartbreak, seeks to help others acknowledge and survive this grief. Readers drawn to this book may be comforted in knowing that others have lived through heartsickness.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Australian writer Stephens parses the "unique and universal" effects of heartbreak in this candid debut. Having experienced the "unholy blend of grief and self-loathing" that, she writes, often follows breakups, Stephens set out to construct a book that "didn't explain away heartbreak," but rather delved into its complexities. She effectively does this by telling the real-life breakup stories of three individuals: 30-ish Claire, who, after moving from London to Australia, met and married her personal trainer, Maggie, despite a friend's caution not to; Ana, a mother of three, who began an affair with her husband's best friend after 25 years of marriage; and 20-something college student Patrick, who fell in love with a girl he couldn't have, until she broke up with her boyfriend for him. As Stephens unspools their stories, each of which succumbs to a slow ruin brought on by doubt and insecurities, she renders in affecting scenes the tidal shifts of emotion--the sickness, the bottomless despair, the acts of self-destruction--that accompany the demise of love. Despite the book's melancholic nature, there's beauty in her subjects' vulnerability and resilience. As Stephens writes, "It is only through sharing... the most tormented parts of ourselves that we're able to discover how much we have in common." A paean to the lovelorn, this stuns in its rawness. (June)
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
A Sydney-based writer and podcaster braids together the stories of three failed romances in an effort to demonstrate the universality of heartbreak. Stephens opens her scattershot debut with a preface as well as introduction, and she closes with an epilogue and an essay on rejection. The bulk of the often maudlin narrative focuses on the different but equally unfortunate experiences of three people, identified with pseudonyms: Patrick, a naïve man in his 20s, "has never had a girlfriend before"; Claire is a 30-something lesbian; and Ana, in her 40s, is a married, unfaithful mother of three. Of her 25-year marriage, Ana "feels like she's on one of those theme-park rides that spins too quickly and suddenly you're stuck to the walls." Before meeting Caitlin, Patrick had never had a woman other than his mother inside his bedroom; now, about her, he has fantasies like this: "They're in bed and it's too hot and their bodies are moving so fast, like the friction of sticks on the brink of creating fire." Claire falls quickly in love with Maggie, who moves in within a few months of their first date. Stephens writes their narratives in the present tense, underscoring her case that past heartbreak is "still present." The result is akin to three soap operas, spliced together, telling tales about crushing disappointment from the viewpoints of myopic characters. Ana's life unravels over the course of her affair with Rob, until she "feels like she's suffocating." After Caitlin breaks up with Patrick, he asks himself, "Where does all the love go when there's nowhere to put it?" Claire, having moved, at Maggie's behest, to Toowoomba before being abandoned, "feels the searing pain that comes with the realization that the person you're with doesn't love you the same way they once did." Stephens concludes that "the world is full of broken people who have put themselves back together," but she offers very little evidence of healing or even evolving. Shallow sappiness. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
