Anybody Out There

    Anybody Out There....well, what can I say about this book...honestly, I started reading it on Mother's Day. I only finished it yesterday. I usually finish a book in two or three days depending on my chores and workload, and on how much I like it. It's different with this book.

    Anybody Out There, a book written by Marian Keyes, is a book about love that's cut too short, how one woman has come to terms to with loss and grief. The first few chapters were quite interesting, made possible by a narrative that alternately showed the past and the present, leaving important details for later. This left me with a lot of questions and had me reading eagerly until I had all my questions answered. Unfortunately, I didn't like the answers. It turned out that the hero in the story was already dead and that the heroine was just in a state of denial all along. Oh! It really broke my heart! Aidan, that's his name, seemed to be the perfect man and the perfect husband to Anna, the heroine. What's worse was that they were just newly married!

     So that's when I stopped reading. The worst part of it all was that I did not have any idea at all that the story was going to turn out this way. I didn't know that the story was about loss. The short text on the back cover of the book did not prepare me for this. All along, I thought that Aidan had a perfectly good excuse for not trying to contact his wife for weeks, and that in the end, they would still end up together.  I actually felt cheated because had I known that the book was about death and moving on, I would have chosen another book.

     So I didn't continue reading for days until the time I got so bored I just had to read something.  I resumed reading, moving from a state of denial to a state of acceptance...so much like Anna's feelings. I was entering the moving on stage, slowly realizing that there could be someone else for her in the future and then suddenly, the book ends with Aidan telling Anna in a dream that she already met the man she was going to fall in love with. And that was that! Anna was seeing two men in the story and I was unsure who Aidan was talking about! I was left hanging!

     The story ended without leaving a tear or smile on my face.   Instead, it left me with a question I think I will never be able to answer. Anna was seeing two men on a regular basis! So who was Aidan talking about?! The book was ok, I guess. Although it would not in any way make it to my favorites, it was an okay book to pass the time away...just skip all the irrelevant email exchanges between Anna and her family members. They're kind of long and didn't have anything to do with the story.

~pic of book cover done on Remby.com~