"...she couldn’t envisage
inspiring such depth of emotion in anyone, and it made her feel
cheated."
The character thinking this has never really been in a mutually loving relationship before and so much of what she thinks and feels is often painful and yet refreshing in a genre that can often retread over mundane or silly things and gloss over the nitty gritty of real life.
There are very few books in my reading life that have ever gotten to me like this. The Fortune Teller's Daughter by Diane Wood has made me sick inside to the point that I have thought about not finishing it more than once and yet I keep going back to it because it is one of the best things I have read in ages and lately I just cannot find myself wanting to read that much so if I do read (and really want to read) it almost feels like a miracle.
Only one other book I ever read made me feel this uncomfortable:
A review at the time went:
“I’ve never seen anyone capture sordid human nature so clearly. I
was completely drawn in, totally immersed. I felt ill much of the time.”
– Russell Kirkpatrick
– Russell Kirkpatrick
Though Slights is a horror novel and The Fortune Teller's Daughter is a romance, both feature characters with unspeakably messed up childhoods. The difference is in how one has embraced what happened to her and taken on its sickness and evil and the other has spent her life trying to escape it and be a good person.
In both, there is a sense that loneliness does not truly hurt until you truly understand and know that you are lonely. And one way that can happen, that is so unbearably real and familiar, is 'one day' being okay with being lonely and the 'next day' having met and made friends with someone really, really special and having lost her or knowing you are going to...suddenly, the loneliness you spent so many, many years with and managed okay enough now feels like the worst kind of heartbreak...
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