REVIEW: The Stopped Heart

The Stopped Heart
By: Julie Myerson
Gnere:  Fiction, mystery, suspense
Rating: 4/5
Publisher: Vintage
Source: Penguin Random House



This book takes a stranger who enters a family home and turns it into something so much more complex than I could ever have forecast. Let me just rave about the characters for a while. Indulge me. There are characters in this book that I despised with every single bone in my body and those that I embraced and wanted to protect and care for. The depth of each character, their presence in the book, their humanness, just everything was freaking brilliant.

The book took me to some dark places in the human psyche and shocked me with choices made by human beings towards other human beings. Truly, I now believe that some people are just born in darkness and it follows them wherever they go. The Stopped Heart is an exceptional work of fiction that had me feel every single emotion on the spectrum, I could NOT put this book down. Life stopped from the moment I started to read it. I can't do it justice with this review

It is a story full of atmosphere, a truly emotional look at love, loss, life, death and all the stuff in between. Julie Myerson weaves a haunting and evocative web here as we learn about Mary, living with devastation, caught up in the moment unable to move on. Alongside her and us the readers, is Eliza, 100 years earlier, about to experience some devastation of her own. 

As the narrative links the two characters, through event and circumstance, through emotion and a hint of other, Julie Myerson writes with true sense of feeling, painting a real picture of different lives lived in the same area many years apart. Tragedy links the two - this is both horrific and very real throughout - you know that something is coming for Eliza but trust me you will not be prepared. And Mary, her loss is tangible, you can taste it - as she struggles to maintain her relationship with her Husband, also grieving, as she tries to find some semblance of a life worth living, this is beautifully done.

This novel is beautifully written. The characters leap off the page with their clarity. The description and events are so realistically rendered that I felt I WAS there. It was an expose on the devastation of grief as well as a chilling portrayal of obsession. I've read some reviews that said the ending let the story down. I disagree. In my mind it couldn't have ended any other way. A chillingly dark, atmospheric, historical suspense thriller, which I will recommend to all who don't mind a dash of paranormal. Definitely one of my favorites this year so far...

There are ghosts/visions and creepy uncomfortable moments, but a book I could read at night alone without totally freaking myself out.

Start to finish, 2 days which indicates a good compelling read.

Highly recommend this novel.



Thank you Penguin Books for sending this book for review !