REVIEW! But I Love Him.

But I Love Him
Amanda Grace



FROM THE COVER:

Sometimes at night, I wake up and stare at the heart for hours. I think of how I collected each piece from the beach, how I glued it all together into one big sculpture. I wonder if Connor realizes what it means, that he'll always have a piece of me no matter what happens. Each piece of glass is another piece of myself that I gave to him.

It's too bad I didn't keep any pieces for myself.

My rating: 4 stars.

MY THOUGHTS:

I read this in one sitting. All 245 pages. Could not put it down.

But I Love Him is beautiful. And painful. Right at the beginning the pain is apparent. I'm sad to say it doesn't get any better, or easier. For a while, Ann is nameless - she remains the suffering narrator, connecting to readers purely through her words and thoughts, without an actual identity.  You will want to hate Connor. You will hate him, but you will empathize with him. Their relationship, which is hardly a relationship, takes its course backward. That's right: the story is told from the present to the past, each chapter a receding date. It's regression that matches the course of their relationship.

I was blown away by the rawness and realness of the story. Despite knowing there was no happy ending in sight, I had to plow through. Ann and Connor are both captivating, in their own respects. However, they did often seem older than eighteen and nineteen; it is at these points that the story loses its believability. There are quite a bit of loose ends, too. You get some sense of their finality, but not enough to really satisfy.

Still, it's a story of pure heartache and love that illuminates the power of belief, persuasion and dependence.