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Each day Olivia expands on a story she tells Gregory about how the relationship between herself and Harold grew into a unique friendship. As the story develops, Gregory learns from Olivia about a completely different side of his father’s personality that Gregory has a hard time believing. What Gregory learns from Olivia helps him solve the mystery that surrounds and troubles his childhood.
I thought this was an intriguing love story. As the story develops the characters are introduced, each living their own lives where we learn what influences made them the people they become. One of the influential factors was the war going on just as they were starting their adult lives and how people’s lives were affected. They were people trying to go about their normal lives but behind everything was always the war affecting their lives and their decisions because most of the young men went away to the war and the families never knew if they were ever going to return. At home, they always had the war in the backs of their minds as they tried to live as normal a life as possible while never knowing if a bomb was going to change their lives forever, or even end their lives, and how some succumbed to the stress and pressure of war and others made the most of what they had.
In my opinion this was an interesting story which made me think about how war times affected people’s lives. World War II affected my parent’s lives and the lives of the parents of our friends. I’ve never lived where there was a war going on, and hopefully I’ll never have to, but I was curious as to how wars affect people’s lives, so for me the love story was an interesting way of looking at war’s effects on peoples’ lives.
There were just a few typos that didn’t affect the quality of the story. I liked the way each character was introduced in separate sections and then developed throughout the book by the way the chapters were organized. I also liked how the author described scenes so it was very easy to picture them and how the descriptions made it seem like just normal things were still being done even though there was a war going on. In one instance the author writes that the character spoke, “ . . . over a piece of honey chicken that sought to escape her tenuous grasp between the chopsticks.” That is just one example of how the author made the scene so easy to picture just from describing a scene from the meal the character was eating.
There was an error in the beginning of the book though. The main character was called Gregory, but for a couple paragraphs his name was typed as Geoffrey which was a little confusing as it was just when I was getting to know the characters.
I would rate this book 3 out of 4 stars. It is a good story, well-organized and well-written, but not an amazing story. The story seemed to me like a low-key love story but I wondered if it was because it was the author’s intent to show how life continues to go on as normally and low-key as it can in the midst of the devastation of war and how much the war actually affects people’s lives and their decisions.
I would recommend this book to a person who is interested in a short, light read with mystery and a love story. There was some sexual content but not a lot, which was fine with me as I don’t really care for romance novels that rely on sexual content to make a story. I would rather read a good story like this one with little sexual content.
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