After You'd Gone

Rating:
Summary: An Emotional Ride
Review: After You'd Gone was such an emotional book ~ in so many ways. I have never read a book that touched on love and loss in such a beautiful and right to the core kinda way, as this book does. You will feel every feeling and thought that each of these wonderful characters goes through ~ whether it's good or bad.

Maggie O'Farrell has done a wonderful job at bringing the reader right into the story. You can't help but wrap your arms around Alice, the main character. You will feel the depth of her love, the deep wounds of her loss, and the helplessness of her being in a coma.

My only wish for this brilliant book, was that the ending didn't come to such an abrupt end. I felt like I invested so much of my heart and time into this story and it just ended ... BOOM... just like that. A very quick ending that didn't do the story justice, in my opinion.

Rating:
Summary: A compelling and compulsive read!
Review: Alice is a 28-year-old young woman who tells us on page one that she took a train from London to Scotland on the day she decided to kill herself. It won't do you any good to skip to the end to find out why. This isn't that kind of story and the answer is not all that simple, although at first you might suspect it to be. The plot is ordered in a deliberate, yet natural way that jumps back and forth in time through the eyes of Alice, her mother, her grandmother, and her husband until the individual pieces add up to our total understanding. Each little vignette is also a fascinating character study in which the reader is invited to look and draw his/her own conclusions.

A story of deep complexity and maturity, it is hard to believe that this is Maggie O'Farrell's first novel. It has all the elements of great literature, love and loss, trust and betrayal, and the sins of one generation visited upon the next. Yet the writing flows naturally and easily. I found it a compulsive read. I was so involved with the characters that I could not leave them alone for long until I reached the last page. I highly recommend this one and look forward to more of this author's work.

Rating:
Summary: I cried!
Review: Without wanting to give anything away, I read this and wept. For many years, I didn't read novels, preferring to skim through tomes on ancient history. They were thrust into my hands by friends, who thought that I might start. I never took any notice, until someone told me to look at page 38. 'After You'd Gone' is partly set in the Scottish town where I grew up, so I devoured the pages for familiar points of reference. I also got pulled into the tale. A love story oft told, but stunningly written by Maggie O'Farrell, it twists time as it's heroine drifts in and out of consciousness after an accident. It's hard to believe that this isn't her story, it's so well described. Happily for her, it isn't.

MO'F plunges the depths, if you'll excuse the cliché. But her watery references are what make it for me, being a girl who grew up next door to a beach (the same one in this book to boot!) And any esoteric knows that water equals feeling. A first novel that made me pea green with envy, yet excited to find out what's next from her pen.