*based on an ARC edition
Not being British it took me a little bit to get used to the different way of punctuation and how the author wrote the dialog essentially phonetically (so the characters read in a Northern England accent) but once I got through that I fell in love. This is a book about love. It is a retelling of the Greek tale of Orpheus and Eurydice (Eurydice in this case being our titular Ella Grey) and it is of course about the love between Orpheus and Ella, an insane, magical, cosmic event; but it also more about the love of Ella's best friend Claire who narrates the story. She is the one who bears the tale because she says she must as she knew them both. But more she was in love with Ella as much as Orpheus ever could be. Anyone familiar with the myth knows how things end up and as with all Greek tales it isn't happy. So we know that there is loss and pain and magic but more than anything what touches you is Claire's love of Ella. It doesn't read as exactly romantic, but maybe it is. Some kinds of love are greater than friendship or romance, and if that was the intention of the author, to portray that of Claire and Ella, he does so admirably. I loved this book. It was written like poetry and it flowed like water over rocks. We feel through Claire Ella's love for Orpheus and his for her; we feel the pain of their loss and his struggle to retrieve Ella from the depths because only he could. Orpheus isn't even human, not really, is more Pied Piper than flesh and we feel that as we read, but at the end his loss and end is more human than anything. I highly recommend this book for just about anyone. Young or old.
Not being British it took me a little bit to get used to the different way of punctuation and how the author wrote the dialog essentially phonetically (so the characters read in a Northern England accent) but once I got through that I fell in love. This is a book about love. It is a retelling of the Greek tale of Orpheus and Eurydice (Eurydice in this case being our titular Ella Grey) and it is of course about the love between Orpheus and Ella, an insane, magical, cosmic event; but it also more about the love of Ella's best friend Claire who narrates the story. She is the one who bears the tale because she says she must as she knew them both. But more she was in love with Ella as much as Orpheus ever could be. Anyone familiar with the myth knows how things end up and as with all Greek tales it isn't happy. So we know that there is loss and pain and magic but more than anything what touches you is Claire's love of Ella. It doesn't read as exactly romantic, but maybe it is. Some kinds of love are greater than friendship or romance, and if that was the intention of the author, to portray that of Claire and Ella, he does so admirably. I loved this book. It was written like poetry and it flowed like water over rocks. We feel through Claire Ella's love for Orpheus and his for her; we feel the pain of their loss and his struggle to retrieve Ella from the depths because only he could. Orpheus isn't even human, not really, is more Pied Piper than flesh and we feel that as we read, but at the end his loss and end is more human than anything. I highly recommend this book for just about anyone. Young or old.
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