A Question Mark Is Half a Heart by Sofia Lundberg

☆☆☆☆
.ePUB, 294 pages
Expected publication: March 23rd 2021 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

About the Book:
By age 50, Elin Boals has created for herself a perfect life: her wildly successful business as Manhattan’s preeminent fashion photographer is flourishing. Her handsome, patient husband is devoted to her; her teenaged daughter, Alice, has been accepted to the ballet academy of her dreams. But then Elin receives an innocuous looking envelope. Folded inside is a star-chart, with an address written by a familiar hand. Shaken, Elin begins to have startling flashbacks, to a life very different from the childhood in a Paris bookstore that she has so lovingly recounted to Alice. In these images, a poverty-stricken little girl cares for her two ragged baby brothers, laughing with her family on the good days, sheltering them from her mother’s sadness and her father’s wrath on the bad days. Elin also remembers vivid walks with a young classmate, Fredrik, whose steadfast friendship and starlit confidences shaped her young life. As Elin becomes consumed by these memories, though, her New York life begins to crumble dramatically. Finally, her family’s troubling questions drive her to face, at last, the brutal secret from her past.

My Review:

You’re just one big question mark. To us and to yourself. 

A question mark is always just half a heart, have you ever thought about that? 

You can’t love someone whose heart is full of secrets. You just can’t.

I loved The Red Address Book by Sofia Lundberg and was so pleased to see she had another book coming out. This one was just as good and as engaging as the first. I don't know what it is about Ms. Lundberg's writing that sucks me in. Nothing really exciting happens for the first half of the book, it's really just regular life, family and love but she has such an eloquent way of putting it. But then the last half of the book.....

...What an absolutely gutting (in a good way) book. The impact of people on one another, the way we carry our baggage from place to place adding more with every relationship like the worst possible souvenirs, how we fail to communicate who we are and what we want, how we don’t know those things because we don’t always know ourselves, how we can become redeemed in the love and loving of another person. You either get this book on an emotional level or you don't...I couldn’t put it down.

Disclosure:
Thank you NetGalley, Sofia Lundberg and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt for the opportunity to read this book in exchange for an impartial review; all opinions are my own.

#AQuestionMarkIsHalfaHeart #NetGalley