I really enjoyed this novel. The first thing that caught my eye was the cover…If the cover wasn’t enough once I read the title I knew I had to read it. A couple of my book mates pointed out that the cover was too much like The Goldfinch. However, I didn’t care, I loved it, damnit. Then the small blurbs on the cover! They had me even more intrigued than the name and the cover did. Reading those couple of little bits on the front cover had me wondering…

What happens once we are gone. Who remembers our stories? Who will discover the parts of our lives we never shared? Once we are gone does it even matter? Or is that when it matters most?

I have to say that now that I’ve finished it, I was exactly right. And that is why I loved this book so much. No it’s not really a mystery…I figured out pretty quickly what was going on. But I’m not sure that mattered at all. It certainly didn’t take away from my enjoyment of the book.

After reading this novel I still am having conversations with myself. I wonder if how well we know those prominent in our life shape most of who we are. If we find out that we actually don’t know them as well as we first believed does that change who we are?

I am also left wondering who suffers the most when we keep part of our lives in the dark. When we, for whatever reasons, can’t be who we are completely in the light of day…well who suffers the most? The person that is hiding part of themselves, the loved ones that really have no clue who their loved ones are? Or is it, perhaps, the people in the shadows that are forced to live there to be with the ones they love?

When I leave a book with these types of questions…well, for me it’s a great day….books like these are why I live to read…sure, I had a few issues with the novel. But at the end of the day, it was thought-provoking. So few books these day are. There are also some really beautiful passages in this novel. Ones I felt compelled to share with others…

Perhaps my favourite quote from the novel:

My mother taught me to read. Not the mechanics of reading – no memorising of tricky words or how to sound out letters – she left all that to my teachers. The lesson she taught mew as a more enduring one. She showed me that it was possible to withdraw into literature: to find your place in a dream-rapt landscape. Her shelves at home were heavy with Victorian and twentieth-century novels, and Hardy was the weightiest of all; Tess of the d’Urbervilles was almost always splayed open by her bedside, where she nightly dipped in and out of Tess’s story. The tragedy of a young girl wronged by parent and man became a sort of talisman for her own life.

Until next time…
Urania xx

Buy it now An Unremarkable Body by Elisa Lodato