You need to sign in or sign up before continuing.
Take a photo of a barcode or cover
hannahleelovestoread's Reviews (639)
Katie and Damian have the perfect life: a famous interior design show, two beautiful daughters, a mansion of their own, and a loving marriage (#couplegoals). But that’s only to the untrained eye. Really, the houses they pretend to design on TV, their own home, their relationships with their daughters, and most of all, their marriage are shams. Katie narrates the story of how maybe, just maybe, a house can become a home - but for whom?
Farewell My Life is a historical novel which begins in a captivating manner, if a slightly bizarre one. Young and naive Grace, a dedicated, Italian-American violin player and the daughter of a so-called “loose woman,” is determined to make a better life for herself than that of her scandalous mother. But when she falls head over heels for the obsessive and temperamental Nicholas Russell despite repeated warnings from her family, terrible secrets come to light.
Had the novel ended there, it would have wrapped up nicely as an early modern tragedy in the vein of Henry James. But alas, Ms. Haggard keeps going, ruining the enormous potential of her story. The plot becomes comically convoluted and almost grotesque in its attempts at intrigue. The story seems to hint at an ultimate moral lesson, but there are too many subplots with untied loose ends to decipher what said moral is intended to be. Characters lose their highlighted features before becoming truly round in the first place, leaving the reader to wonder at their true place within the story. While I believe that Ms. Haggard is likely a talented author with enormous potential, I do not consider her novel Farewell My Life to be worth the read.
Had the novel ended there, it would have wrapped up nicely as an early modern tragedy in the vein of Henry James. But alas, Ms. Haggard keeps going, ruining the enormous potential of her story. The plot becomes comically convoluted and almost grotesque in its attempts at intrigue. The story seems to hint at an ultimate moral lesson, but there are too many subplots with untied loose ends to decipher what said moral is intended to be. Characters lose their highlighted features before becoming truly round in the first place, leaving the reader to wonder at their true place within the story. While I believe that Ms. Haggard is likely a talented author with enormous potential, I do not consider her novel Farewell My Life to be worth the read.
