<b> "How beautiful, the doomed love! How gorgeous and ambient, the ways we abandon each other! The lovely wars we die in, the poetry of disease!" </b> Every reader has experienced it: We see family or friends at a party and we tell them we love to read. "Oh, wow, really?", they say, surprised, and we don't know if we should feel flattered because we are such a rare and sophisticated species or insulted because somehow it still shocked them that we actually enjoy the beauty of words, as if they would have never expected us to be that smart. So we just say, awkwardly: "Yeah." "What do you like to read?" And this is where it gets difficult. How about this: <i> I love reading books that have an effect on me with characters I fall in love with so deeply that it physically hurts me when they bleed. I want to feel heartache and brutality, peace and love, anger and happiness and everything inbetween. I want to drink up the world through words and still want more. Does this make sense? I want to live 100 lives, feel 100 emotions and feel my heart beat in my chest while I sit completely still and ink turns into entire worlds in my mind. Do you know that kind of book? </i> But we answer: "Oh, ya know. This and that." Well, dear reader, this book was the kind of story I like. I was sceptical when my aunt then gifted me this on my birthday and said that it reminded her of me (she clearly hasn't read it). And I don't know if I should feel offended that she saw a book about the gaynocide called AIDS in the 80s and thought "Oh yeah. Just like my niece" but okay, we'll go with it. But this book...was good in a slow, heartburn kind of way. Let's talk about some of the points that stood out to me: <u> 1) The topic </u> Before I say anything else I want to say this: Rebecca Makkai, the world owes you a lot for choosing this topic for your book. I thank every God out there that we as a society have tried to change and be more open - but Jesus Christ, the stories of so many men and women of the generations before us that weren't as lucky as we are still go untold, unheard, unread. Of course I know the AIDS-wave was bad. It still is for many people today. Did you know that each year, globally speaking, 1 Million people still die as a result of an HIV-infection (and c'mon it's 2024!)? That means 1,5% of deaths are a result of this. And yet we are not the generation that had to witness the war zone the big cities were, as shown in this book that takes place in Chicago of the 1980s. And it's not an easy topic to write about. You have to be a certain type of sensitive and respectful. And Makkai truly did it brilliantly. I feel like that was a topic I should read about. That everyone should have heard about. But...we don't. I feel like this book was a beautiful way of showing respect and to pay homage to all the misunderstood and wronged young men and women of the past. So, even though this broke my heart and I wheeped like a child: Thank you for opening my eyes to this. <u> 2) Characters </u> You know I am a sucker for good characters. And Makkai really did some great work with hers. They felt so real in my head that I feel like I have known them all my life. And yet - and yet I only ended up liking 1,5 of them...? Oopsie. Yale has all my heart. He is a good man. He was absolutely wonderful and relatable all the time. I have nothing negative to say about him. Love this man. Cried over him. Cried for him. Will probably do that again before I go to bed tonight. Fiona was a 50/50 for me because I liked her when I was young and was annoyed of her older self. Her friendship with Yale is what made me absolutely admire her. Selfless and strong and yet...broken, distant and flawed because of it. It's a realistic character development but it still made me kinda sad. So she is the 0,5. Charlie can respectfully go fuck himself even though he didn't deserve that ending. Julian Ames, Teddy, Asher, Nico, Terrance, Cecily, Richard...I liked you. I want to go partying with you and I bonded with you and your life stories. All in all: Very close to life, absolute realism, flawed and very human characters that just felt so real as if I could stretch my arm out and touch them. That's truly a gift you have there, Makkai. <u> 3) The plot </u> And this is where the bumpy road begins and which is the reason why I wanted to seperate the topic and the characters from this, because both of them were a 10/10, but the plot, for me, was a 4/10. I got into a reading slump because of the pacing of the first half of the book but would have felt too ignorant concerning the relevant topic if I would have dnfed it so I kept on going. And the first half really felt like FOREVER. Nothing big really happened. And I was waiting for a bomb to drop, prayed for anything, literally ANYTHING to happen at first because the plot was just so...ordinary. At first!!!! AT. FIRST!!! Because we start with Nico dying (yes, tragic, but we didn't really know him) and then a little bit relationship-drama but nothing bad and then Yale doing his job finding okay art. That's it. In the other timeline of 2015, older Fiona goes to Paris looking for her grown-up daughter because she realised she has been a terrible mother and just woke up one random day and decided to give a shit. Also boring at first, because it was absolutely fruitless and we just followed her wandering around Paris, being just as lost as we are. That's it. That's the first half. Then in the middle of the book Charlie breaks up with him and then everything goes spiralling. And then that is the point when the 2015-timeline starts becoming the "Do I give a shit? NO"-chapter that I almost want to skip because I have to know what's happening to Yale. It was fustrating, really. When half of your book is ordinary boring life, it kills it for about 80% of the readers who nowadays have an attention span of TikTok. It's only because of my perfectionism that doesn't let me quit books half-through and respect for the topic that made me continue. The last half was good, I'm not denying it. I cried so hard that my dog came over to see if I was dying. I was. On the inside *dramatic* But the plot itself...just wasn't for me. You could have chopped this book in half and you wouldn't miss the first piece. Make it shorter, let it carry a message, get the reader invested, hook him from the beginning till the end. But don't let the turtle die before it even reaches the water. <u> 4) Loss and Ghosts - How to cope with death </u> There were soooo many parallels of love, loss and legacy in this book that I absolutely loved. Nora's undying love for Novak, for example. He was the love she never got over, the "maybe" that never left her life. Maybe if the war hadn't come, maybe all her friends would have lived. Maybe if Novak hadn't gone to war, he would have stayed with her. Maybe they would have married. But as the story goes, she was left to deal with the ghosts of people that history just...forgot: <b> "Every time I've gone to a gallery, the rest of my life, I've thought about the works that weren't there. Shadow-paintings, you know, that no one can see but you. But there are all these happy young people around you and you realize no, they're not befret. They don't see the empty spaces." [...] "But when someone's gone and you're the primary keeper of his memory - letting go would be a kind of muder, wouldn't it?" </b> There were so many parallels just in this beautiful quote I gave you here. With Nico the painter, the artist as the first AIDS-victim of the friend group as a parallel to Nora's love dying. The gallery with the empty shadow-paintings for Yale who works in a gallery and lives with the loss of all his friends, slowly dying around him. But Nora and Yale are not the only people who we experience loss through. The loosing suddenly become the loss. And Fiona is the one who I think is the most tragic second-hand-victim of the AIDS-epidemic, because she has to go on living her life without the people most dear to her. She's basically scarred for life at the young age of 21. It's love that has the biggest impact on our dear characters. Yale suffers from the dirty breakup from Charlie. Nora can't let go of her love for Novak who has been dead for almost half a century. Fiona suffers from her brother's death and her terrible relationship with her daughter. So, in the end, this book is love turning into pain, slowly, in different versions. <b> "Does it really go anywhere?" "Does what?" "Love. Does it vanish?" "I mean, we never want it to. But it does, doesn't it?" "I think that's the saddest thing in the world, the failure of love. Not hatred, but the failure of love." </b> Wow, I'm reliving second-hand-ptsd again just writing this. It's too fresh, I have to get a tissue because I can't stop sobbing. People turn into people we love. And people turn into memories. But love...feelings...they last and they take on different forms of grief, different forms of pain. Trauma, blame... <b> "I've been down that road. The thing is, if you stop blaming people and everything's still crap, the only thing left is to blame the world. And when you blame the whole world, when it seems like the planet doesn't want you, and if there's a God, he hates you - that's worse than hating yourself. It is." </b> And then - the sad beauty of it. The one that made me cry-smile in the end, when Nora saw that video of the characters I have grown so fond of and then lost, just like her. Pain turning into memory and memory turning into something tragically beautiful. <u> 5) The fucking pain of this book </u> I will never forgive Makkai for letting Yale die on me. I hope she felt bad when she wrote it. I hope she cried too. The unfairness of it all, the hopelessness, the finality of it. <b> "And I really used to believe we were the last generation. Like, if I thought about it, if I worried about death, it was all of us I was thinking about, the whole planet. And now it's like, no, it's just you. YOU. YOU'RE the one who's gonna miss out." </b> My heart bleeds for all the people who have to experience this. All the people who know/knew they will die a too young, hopeless and painful death. Maybe even a lonely one, like Yale. I think it will take me a while to fully process and recover from this book. The underlying messages and topics were so breathtakingly painful and beautiful, it broke me. <u> 6) Yes, you have finally reached it: My overall-rating </u> I feels wrong giving this book only 3 stars, but I don't have it in me to add one more. Looking back the book was absolutely beautiful, but while reading it it could become tiresome and boring inbetween which ruined it for me and seems undeserving of 4 stars. So I would give it a 3,5 with a big hug. Y'all need it. I need one. Goodnight, I'm going to cry myself to sleep.

“I was back in love the instant I saw him. It’s the strangest thing, isn’t it, to find someone again after a great deal of time. Your brain resets itself to the last time you saw them” “It was more and more often how he thought of people: not as the sum of all the disappointments, but as every beginning they’d ever represented, every promise.”

3,5*