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Angela Young
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Publisher | Beautiful Books | ||
ISBN | 978-190563622 | ||
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Jayne
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Synopsis
When human beings don't talk about love things go wrong. If a mother had told her daughter, even once, that she loved her they might not have spent years without seeing each other. If a man had found the courage to tell a woman that he'd always loved her she might never have married a different man. And if a father had told his daughter that he loved her when her mother died, she might not have suffered the breakdown that caused a rift with her own daughter years later. But if you are born into a family that never talks about love, how do you learn to say the words? "Speaking of Love" is a first novel about what happens when people who love each other don't say so. It is also about the human need for stories and how stories can help make sense of the random nature of life. The novel is set in East Anglia, in London and at a storytelling festival in the grounds of a medieval castle in south Wales.
Angela Young 2008 by Victoria Warren
Review
Speaking of Love is a wonderful first novel by Angela Young. The book is written in four parts - told over a period of four days in July 1996. But the parts do not just encompass those four days but many years before, until the charactors meet again at a castle in Wales.
What I loved about the novel, was that it is one of those books that each person tells their bit of the story of the trials and tribulations, and the pain and love that they have not dared to admit to. Especially to anyone else with in the group, until the very last story - named -The Tree Story. The story that unlocks the mother's love for her daughter - something the daughter had wanted to understand since her mum's illness when she was a child.
I loved this book and from the third part I read it to the end in one sitting, finishing it at 5am in the morning. I wanted to cry for so many of the charactors within the book because they had not had the courage to speak out their feelings.
Thank you Angela for bringing such an encouraging book, beautifully written and for touching on a subject that many would not wish to be known about their family history. I found it so refreshing to think that a subject so taboo as schizophrenia, with it hallucinations and heartache can be turned around in the way you have in your book 'Speaking of Love'.
The book made me want to ring all my children and grandchildren and just tell them how much I loved them, and that even through life's problems and ups and downs, they could still count on me to love them, how ever far away we are from each other every day of our lives.
Please click here to read Angela's short story Midnight Blues
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