Dutton
This Is a Love Story: A Read with Jenna Pick
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AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER READ WITH JENNA BOOK CLUB PICK AS FEATURED ON TODAY
"This may be the most epic love story I've ever, ever read."--Jenna Bush Hager on TODAY
An intimate and lyrical celebration of great love, great art, and the sacrifices we make for both.
For fifty years, Abe and Jane have been coming to Central Park, as starry-eyed young lovers, as frustrated and exhausted parents, as artists watching their careers take flight. They came alone when they needed to get away from each other, and together when they had something important to discuss. The Park has been their witness for half a century of love. Until now.
Jane is dying, and Abe is recounting their life together as a way of keeping them going: the parts they knew--their courtship and early marriage, their blossoming creative lives--and the parts they didn't always want to know--the determined young student of Abe's looking for a love story of her own, and their son, Max, who believes his mother chose art over parenthood, and who has avoided love and intimacy at all costs. Told in various points of view, even in conversation with Central Park, these voices weave in and out to paint a portrait as complicated and essential as love itself.
An homage to New York City, to romance, and even to loss, This Is a Love Story tenderly and suspensefully captures deep truths about life and marriage in radiant prose. It is about love that endures despite what life throws at us, or perhaps even because of it.
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Book Details
ISBN:
9780593851265
EAN:
9780593851265
Binding:
Hardcover
Pages:
304
Authors:
Jessica Soffer
Publisher:
Dutton
Published Date: 2025-04-02
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I agree totally with Donna's review. The style is NOT the style of storytelling, and it is very hard to stay with this book -- or want to stay with it! I read a mixture of fiction and nonfiction; and can enjoy many different kinds of writing -- but, this felt like a waste of time.
A husband, a wife, a son and other relatives, all coming together to make life work. So many descriptions of endearing thoughts and wishes. Temptation has to come but in the end love prevails.
If I could only take five or ten books with me to the proverbial desert island (with no WiFi), this would be one of them. Fabulous book, gorgeous writing.
This is a very well done book chronicling the course of one couple’s relationship. Very realistic and reflective. I was hoping for something a little more upbeat but that’s on me.
Jane, a beloved wife, artist, and mother is dying, exiting this world having battled cancer again and again defeating it her way through her art. A lover of Central Park, Jane and her husband and son Max have treasured all the park has given, has represented, and has endured. So, not surprisingly, all of the members of her family experience quiet reflections within this park.At times the book unfolds in a narrative stream of consciousness that works, and other times it stalls, loops, repeats, lurches, and misses. Long passages from a love-struck student of Jane’s husband who has become a celebrated writer, seem distracting, without purpose.Max, the son, a commodity merchant of arts, arts he seems at times to resent and hate, rambles in his narratives, negative and lonely, misanthropic.A love story less about individuals, and more about places in time, moments, and arts, this novel seems to heart break, heart ache, and hear beat.
