The Love of my Life - Rosie Walsh

Author: Rosie Walsh

Genre: Contemporary Fiction with elements of mystery.

Rating: 2 stars.

In a Nutshell: Great in bits and pieces but doesn’t come together into a cohesive whole. This might have ended up a strong favourite of mine if I could have connected with the writing style better. But the disconnect with the plot and the decisions of one MC resulted in a strictly average experience.

Story Synopsis:

Emma and Leo have been married for seven years and live happily with their three year old daughter Ruby and their dog John Keats. Through ups and downs, they’ve been supportive of each other, even when Emma gets diagnosed with an aggressive cancer and begins the uncertain journey to recovery. Leo is an obituarist by profession and as Emma, a marine biologist, happens to be a somewhat famous celeb through her stint on TV as a presenter, Leo works on a stock obituary for his wife as his way of coping through her treatment. To his shock, his research leads him to realise that the Emma he knew from the past decade is a very different person. Who is the real Emma?

Emma, meanwhile, realises that Leo has begun cracking her carefully constructed shell. Will she be able to tell him about “the love of my life” without putting their marriage in jeopardy?

The story comes to us in the first person perspectives of Leo and Emma.

In terms of its premise, the book felt tailor-made for me. I loved the drama plus mystery vibes in the blurb. However, this doesn’t transform well to reality. The book seems like a hodgepodge of various genres – romance, suspense, family drama, literary fiction, domestic thriller – without doing justice to most.

Emma seems to have a multitude of secrets, ranging from the trivial to the terrifying. But I wasn’t convinced at all by her reasons to keep so much of her past a secret from Leo. Some of the justifications were valid, I agree. But the rest were just RIDICULOUS! I simply didn’t get her! The rest of the characters, bar Leo, also seem shifty, not leading you to believe any of them. Plus, there’s a deliberate attempt to mislead through the interconnected characters (Don’t get me started on the coincidence of so many random characters being known to each other!) Leo is the only one I found somewhat real in his emotions and the only one I felt somewhat sorry for.

The book began terribly slow, but in a strange irony, the initial section was the best part for me. The way in which the characters are established and the suspense is created is wonderful. As the book progressed, its pace increased somewhat but the secrets and the twists became more and more farfetched. I want my book twists to be more “Wow!” than “WTF!” Thus my rating kept sliding downwards with every turn of the page. The ending was too silly and predictable. A story needs to have an element of believability. This one didn’t meet that criterion by far.

On the positive side, for the first time ever, I saw a character working as an “obituarist”. I had always guessed that newspapers might be having some obituaries in stock but the extent to which this system covers potential deaths was very interesting to read. I loved Ruby – she was adorable. I liked how the title could range from something romantic to something creepy, depending on how you read it. (And both those meanings apply to the book.)

All in all, this could have been a great story for me. But the haphazard development of the situations and the unrealistic behaviour of most of the characters made this a strictly average experience.

My thanks to Pan Macmillan and NetGalley for the DRC of “The Love of My Life”. This review is voluntary and contains my honest opinion about the book. Sorry this didn't work out better.