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A riveting, poignant, suspenseful look at the highs and the lows of love, marriage, and the opening of one’s heart, (as raw and vulnerable as it gets) to the dreams and dispositions of another.
A particular other. (And what a difference that choice can make).
Told in the first person POV voice of two women, Pippa and Amanda, who alternate back and forth in time between ‘Now” and “Then’, it’s clear each woman is capable of feeling deep love, and has cast her lot alongside another. That’s where the similarity ends, however, as Pippa, a lawyer and a young mother, struggles with the vagaries of her breathtakingly beautiful husband Gabe, whose irregular and unpredictable behavior is a torment and a constant trial laid out for her loyalty and her love.
“Gabe could hurt me.
But he could also make me fly.”
Amanda, on the other hand, is a fifty-two-year old photographer, married to Max, a wealthy media mogul who appears, on the surface, to be a good man, a steady and dependable man, richly deserving of her fidelity. Or is he?
As Pippa, (owner, with Gabe, of an atmospheric and dangerously precipitous cliff-top house), finds the tension in her life skyrocket in parallel with Gabe’s inescapable propensities, Amanda and her story (and the connection between the two narratives) begins to weave mysteriously around it all, setting the stage for an absorbing and shadowy showdown of sorts, which the reader is led to and left at the very edge of – a fitting ending for a nail-biting finale.
As the author plays with her literary puzzle and what it all implies to the weightiness of loaded terms such as “loyalty’, “fidelity”, and “soulmate”, questions cannot help but surface.
How much of one’s self is safely submergible in another?
Does the answer depend on the “worthiness” of ones choice?
Do each of us truly have a choice, or is there one (and only one) “soulmate” out there for us to claim?
A wonderfully challenging read, I loved this book, – slowly setting the stage for passion, drama, suspense and most of all, a mass of tender contradictions – compelling the reader to bear witness to the distance that can span between the achingly vivid helplessness, or the quiet euphoria, experienced by a woman in love, at a single point in time, each of us falling anywhere (and potentially everywhere) across such a divide, in itself as dangerous as it can be divinely welcoming.
A great big thank you to @Netgalley for an ARC of this book. All thoughts presented are my own.
