I enjoy historical fiction. I like when the stories of real people are used as the basis and their stories are told like this one, as if we are with them and they are talking to us. I like when fictional characters are our tour guide to real events and people. While I know there is much creative license taken I still enjoy it and am always interested in what tidbits are true and which are imagined.
I am also a sucker for a good sale. When the good sale is on a good book it is like hitting the jackpot. That is what happened here. This new release hardcover was on a 4 day 50% sale at Barnes & Noble leading up to Mother's Day and I had a 15% coupon and my member 10% discount, so how could I resist? The answer is I couldn't.
Told from the perspective of Ernest Hemingway's 3rd wife, the writer/war correspondent/brave Marty Gellhorn, Love and Ruin is an entertaining, well written, trip back in time to the WWII years as written about and seen by Marty as she meets, falls in love with, and marries Hemingway. She loves him so strongly she beings to, as many women do, lose herself in trying to please him. And like in many relationships, when she tries to reclaim her sense of who she is it rocks the foundation of her marriage.
While she isn't perfect by any means, she was after all "the other woman" for a time. But she isn't cruel and she isn't oblivious to the damage their love causes. But she is interesting and feels real on the page. Hemingway comes off as a bit of an overgrown baby. His sons are written as terrific young man that Marty can't help but love and they love her in return.
Her heart breaks when she sees war up close, she works hard to tell the stories of the people shaken lose from their lives by the bombings and invasions and in so doing her reader's heart breaks too. And McLain makes us feel this in her telling of Marty's story.
This is my first McLain read but I will read more of her work, I enjoyed her style.
(Finished May 14, 2018)
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