Faithful by Alice Hoffman Find the Author: Website, Twitter, Facebook, Goodreads
Published by Simon and Schuster on November 1st 2016
Genres: Womens Fiction
Purchase links: Amazon, iTunes, Audible
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Source: Simon & Schuster Audio
From the New York Times bestselling author of The Marriage of Opposites and The Dovekeepers comes a soul-searching story about a young woman struggling to redefine herself and the power of love, family, and fate.
Growing up on Long Island, Shelby Richmond is an ordinary girl until one night an extraordinary tragedy changes her fate. Her best friend’s future is destroyed in an accident, while Shelby walks away with the burden of guilt.
What happens when a life is turned inside out? When love is something so distant it may as well be a star in the sky? Faithful is the story of a survivor, filled with emotion—from dark suffering to true happiness—a moving portrait of a young woman finding her way in the modern world. A fan of Chinese food, dogs, bookstores, and men she should stay away from, Shelby has to fight her way back to her own future. In New York City she finds a circle of lost and found souls—including an angel who’s been watching over her ever since that fateful icy night.
Here is a character you will fall in love with, so believable and real and endearing, that she captures both the ache of loneliness and the joy of finding yourself at last. For anyone who’s ever been a hurt teenager, for every mother of a daughter who has lost her way, Faithful is a roadmap.
Alice Hoffman’s “trademark alchemy” (USA TODAY) and her ability to write about the “delicate balance between the everyday world and the extraordinary” (WBUR) make this an unforgettable story. With beautifully crafted prose, Alice Hoffman spins hope from heartbreak in this profoundly moving novel.
We received this book/audiobook for free in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect our opinion of the book or the content of our review.
Audiobook Review: 5 Stars
What a beautiful, heartbreaking, and lessons-teaching story is Faithful. I’m so happy I decided to listen to this audiobook, because it made me laugh and cry, dream and love, hate and forgive and have all kind of mixed emotions that made me question everything about life, made me think about decisions, regrets, determination and most of all, about how to live and keep going in life despite of.
Faithful tells 10 years of Shelby’s life after a tragic accident that left her best friend in a comma. When she was discharged from the hospital she didn’t speak, her guilt of her survival was paralyzing until one day she received an anonymous postcard with just a little advice: “Say Something”. For a moment she thought it was a message from Helene, her best friend, but “How could that be if she was in a comma?” but she felt it to be so true and followed that advice and every other simple message that was sent to her on postcards through the years. “Do something”, “Want something”, “Trust someone” were the simple messages sent to her and she followed them all and every time something great happened in her life, even though she didn’t feel it that way at the moment.
I won’t lie to you, her life wasn’t easy. She tried to commit suicide, she did drugs, she moved away from her family because she felt trapped and started a relationship with a boy out of loneliness. But she also found a good friend in a co-worker who fastly became her new best friend, along with her three kids. She rescued three dogs and loved with all her soul, and found passion and peace in taking care of animals. And despite all the good and bad things that happened to her during all those years, she always felt guilty for her friend Helena was in a comma and she was “wasting” her life. Until one day she met the person who kept sending her those postcards and her life finally found its axis.
Amber Tamblyn’s narration of Faithful was flawless. Her tone of voice, her pronunciation, her inflexions, her pace. Everything was impeccable. There were two moments in this audiobook that were so hard for me and I couldn’t stop crying and I’m 100% sure that if I was only reading it, and listening to my own voice in my mind, it wouldn’t have felt as it felt with Amber’s narration. This is my first audiobook narrated by her and I looking forward to listen to more audios narrated by Amber.
All in all, Faithful was a beautiful book. Alice Hoffman was a new author to me and I loved her writing, the complexity of the storyline and characters but most of all, the reality of the story itself. I hope to read more books by her in the future.
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