So this book was recommended to me by a person I had just met. I don't remember how it came up in conversation but I am always on the lookout for a book that a person thinks is one of the best they have ever read and this was this woman's suggestion.
she was too tired to even resist the photo setup
So this story is about a woman named Lily, who will frequently flash back in the story about her childhood and how her family life was pretty good, but there was a dark side to it as her father was somewhat abusive towards her mother. Ok, I guess a bit more than "somewhat" because if you are hitting another person that goes kind of over into "definitely" territory.
Lily still had a pretty fantastic childhood compared to another kid who goes to her school that squatted in an abandoned house that is next door to hers and while noticing that this boy "Atlas" was living with next to nothing and also still attending the same school as her, she goes out of her way to help him, befriend him, and eventually develop a really close relationship with.
Time passes and we end up spending most of the story in modern times where Lily has grown up, her father has passed away, and she has no idea where Atlas is. She goes about her life and by happenstance runs into a very attractive and successful man named Ryle, which is a stupid name but it's a book so let's just go with it. Ryle is charming, in fantastic shape, kind, generous, and seems like the dream guy for anyone to meet. Things just get a bit strange later on and I feel like I shouldn't tell you more about this out of fear of ruining the story.
Let's just say that Lily gets reunited with Atlas and I don't think that's a spoiler because why else would the author spend so much time focusing on him in the first 1/3 of the book.
While I was reading this book and didn't really know what the whole story was I sent a message to the girl who recommended it and told her I thought the book was seriously cringe. I stand by that opinion because for about half of it, the lovey-dovey romance stuff is not really like anything I have ever witnessed or experienced in life outside of romantic films that I was forced to watch by girlfriends. I admit that I was figuratively or literally rolling my eyes at some of the dialogue that takes place between Lily and Ryle as well as some of the romantic scenarios they ended up in.
But if you are like me and abandon things when they get a bit cringe like this do yourself a favor, like I did, and carry on anyway. While a great deal of what happens in this book is too gushy to be real, you get past that and the real "meat and potatoes" of the book starts to shine through about halfway through the book.
The book is around 400 pages, which puts it in the same-same category as most books these days and I like to equate it to the minimum length that a film has to be and books tend to be the same if they want to be considered for awards and what not.
There is a film made from this story as well.
While I was discussing the book with a friend, I was informed that this film was pretty important not necessarily because it was a good film but because it exposed Blake Lively as being kind of an awful person after many years of all of us just presuming she was super-kind and her relationship with Ryan Reynolds was one to be admired by all humanity. It turns out she is kind of evil and awful to work with and has been blacklisted by a lot of Hollywood because of how she behaved during the filming and production of this very movie.
Funny how a story about abuse would end up having a bunch of abuse associated with it with a woman with power flexing her clout to screw over other people and make them bend to her desires.. Ironic!
Anyway, let's leave the Hollywood drama out of this and I'll just say that this book was a real page-turner and I tore through it in less than a week. I even stayed up a lot longer than I should have one night because my Kindle told me I was 90% of the way through the book band well, let's just go ahead and wrap this bad boy up why don't we?
While this topic matter is well out of my wheelhouse I thoroughly enjoyed it and think it will appeal to almost anyone out there. While it does seem like a cheesy love story at first, it is so much more than that. I ended up apologizing for my brash comments towards the person that recommended it to me.
Here is the Goodreads link if any of you out there are into that sort of thing.