A review by obsidian_blue
Love and Other Paradoxes by Catriona Silvey

• Strong character development? No
• Loveable characters? No

2.0

 

Please note that I received this book via NetGalley. This did not affect my rating or review. 

"Love and Other Paradoxes" takes place in 2004. We follow Cambridge student, Joseph (Joe) Greene. Joe has been dealing with an insane amount of writer's block and does not know if he's going to be able to graduate let alone become a successful poet. Going into a coffee shop, Joe ends up meeting a young woman named Esi. He doesn't know why he follows her and wants to know more about her, but then he ends up picking up a book that could not possibly have been written since it shows it was published by him in the year 2044. Joe is shocked that Esi is a time traveler who is hell-bent on stopping something that Joe is going to be part of. It ends up causing a lot of butterfly effects (yeah, I said it).

Not too much to say about this one except it wasn't very well thought out or developed IMHO. I thought we would get something akin to what the summary said, "About Time" which I honestly did love as a romance movie. I don't know what I would liken this to since it just didn't work for me at all in several different ways.

Joe was not someone I rooted for at all. Probably because he was falling in and out of love with people every five seconds. Don't try to sell me on some epic romance and it seems whatever way the wind blows is his philosophy. I wanted something deeper there for the character. Something that was going to show some type of sacrifice. "About Time" blows you away when the hero realizes that he can't go back beyond a certain point in time and he will not be able to see someone he loves anymore. Grief hits them hard and I know I cried like a baby during one of those scenes. There's not none of that. And no offense, based on the poetry that Silvey shows us that Joe writes, I got to wonder why anyone in the future was obsessed with visiting his basic ass.

Esi. UGHHHH. Look, same issue with Joe but also I am a little more aggravated with her. There's a whole freaking reason that Esi comes back. And honestly it was some of the most hodge podge mess. And I don't want to do spoilers for the review, only thing I could say was that some type of therapy needed to occur and maybe that does not exist in the future. Also, I never got some big overwhelming grief from her at all about anything. Once again, it's a lot of lip service that didn't ring true.

The other characters we get to know, Diana, Ray, etc. were just kind of there. Honestly, the only character that Silvey gave any spark to, and that was towards the end, was Diana. I was hoping for a different ending than what we got, because at least that would have been interesting and not so blah.

The setting of Cambridge in 2004 was a choice. I maybe judged the crap out of Esi because of all the crap going on now and this is what the most important thing to her was to do with the whole go back to time and change things. Bahhhhh.

The flow was bad. I don't know what else to say. It just never hung together well and the whole book was a chore.

The ending made me laugh (not in a good way). Things get explained by, I guess this doesn't matter even though the whole book said it did and I just gave up.