Book Review: Love Anthony
Love Anthony by Lisa Genova
Narrator: Debra Messing
Length: 9 hours and 11 minutes
Publisher: Simon & Schuster Audio
Release Date: September 25, 2012
My rating: 4.5 of 5 stars
Publisher’s Description:
Two women, each cast adrift by unforeseen events in their lives, meet by accident on a Nantucket beach and are drawn into a friendship.
Olivia is a young mother whose eight-year-old severely autistic son has recently died. Her marriage badly frayed by years of stress, she comes to the island in a trial separation to try and make sense of the tragedy of her Anthony’s short life.
Beth, a stay-at-home mother of three, is also recently separated after discovering her husband’s long-term infidelity. In an attempt to recapture a sense of her pre-married life, she rekindles her passion for writing, determined to find her own voice again. But surprisingly, as she does so, Beth also find herself channeling the voice of an unknown boy, exuberant in his perceptions of the world around him if autistic in his expression—a voice she can share with Olivia—(is it Anthony?)—that brings comfort and meaning to them both.
The author creates a vivid portrait of how a marriage is affected by a child with profound special needs and then also by the death of a child. I found Olivia’s character to be authentic and heartbreaking. Beth’s marriage is also disintegrating because of her husband’s infidelity and she relies on a colorful cast of supporting characters to help her make it through.
I enjoyed both Beth and Olivia’s stories but I fell in love with Anthony. Ms. Genova does a fabulous job of getting inside of the mind of a non-verbal, autistic boy and interpreting the thought behind his behaviors. No doubt her Ph.D. in neuroscience has something to do with this. Even though Beth somehow channeling Anthony in her writing is unrealistic, I was so caught up in Anthony’s story that it didn’t bother me. I was crying by the end and books don’t usually make me cry.
This book was narrated by Debra Messing (of Will and Grace and Smash fame). She has the same voice for all of the characters and the narration, except for Anthony’s voice. That didn’t bother me though – she is such a great actress that she could convey the feelings and emotions of all of the characters without giving them different voices. One thing that did bother me was that she had a tendency to trail off at the end of a sentence. If I turned the volume up loud enough to hear the tail end of the sentence clearly, then it would be blaringly loud for the beginning of the next sentence.
I thought Love Anthony was a fantastic book and I look forward to reading more by Lisa Genova.
Buy this book at:
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(I received this audio book courtesy of the Solid Gold Reviewers program at Audio Jukebox.)
