Hello Book Friends, I hope you are all doing well?
WOW!!! Well, I really didn’t know what I was getting myself into when I grabbed this audiobook!!
After 32hrs of listening to this, I was an exhausted, pool of emotions.
My Review
This story is HARD GOING, it has ALLL the trigger warnings, so please be careful if you decide to read this, it could be very triggering for some.
The story is about 4 friends from college who decide to all move to NYC One is an architect, one is a painter, one is an actor, and one is a lawyer.
This is their story, each of the characters has their own demons to fight, but none as much as Jude.
Jude has his own story to tell, and it is told in heartbreakingly graphic detail, he is not only brilliant, but he is also a broken child-like gay man, who doesn’t really know who he is, and has to rely on Willem to be his emotional crutch and partner.
This is not a fast paced book don’t go in expecting the smash-and-grab experience, you won’t get that here, but what you will get is connection, a connection with every character, but mostly with Willem and Jude and their story.
This is a highly emotional book, and I can tell you that I SOBBED reading this, I cannot warn you enough about the emotion in this book.
There was great representation in here, there are multiple POC, LGBTQ relationships, Disabled representation in an MC, and a really great friendship base between them all.
It also shows mental health issues and how they are perceived.
This book is LONG, 700+ pages, so don’t go into it lightly thinking that it is going to be all hearts and flowers, IT. MOST. DEFINITELY. IS. NOT.
But if you want to read a beautiful story, about friendships, love, loss and horror this is the book for you.
If you were a fly on the wall and lived in a house for years and years, and got to watch every single persons life unfold in front of your eyes, this is what would have been written about it.
TRIGGER WARNINGS FOR EVERYTHING, I’M NOT JOKING AROUND!!!!!
🎧🎧
Narrated by Oliver Wyman who was just amazing, it took me a while to get used to his voice, but he made every character come alive, and I was invested in them all.
Enjoy
Vicci 📚💛✨
Synopsis
When four classmates from a small Massachusetts college move to New York to make their way, they’re broke, adrift, and buoyed only by their friendship and ambition. There is kind, handsome Willem, an aspiring actor; JB, a quick-witted, sometimes cruel Brooklyn-born painter seeking entry to the art world; Malcolm, a frustrated architect at a prominent firm; and withdrawn, brilliant, enigmatic Jude, who serves as their center of gravity.
Over the decades, their relationships deepen and darken, tinged by addiction, success, and pride. Yet their greatest challenge, each comes to realize, is Jude himself, by midlife a terrifyingly talented litigator yet an increasingly broken man, his mind and body scarred by an unspeakable childhood, and haunted by what he fears is a degree of trauma that he’ll not only be unable to overcome—but that will define his life forever.
Berit Talks Books 