Review of Looking Glass Friends

[LeeAnn Capistran]

[Following is a volunteer review of "Looking Glass Friends" by E L Neve.]

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5 out of 5 stars

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This book is about two people who are already married, one having a child, and feeling that their marriage is not the one they were supposed to be in. They struggle with the thought of having a soul mate outside their marriage, and this inner conflict helps free these people from what they have been unhappily settling for so long. Through the Looking Glass Friends is an appropriate title as these characters experience what ifs and longing beyond what they settled for in their marriage.

I've given this book a 5 out of 5 for its compelling story telling and the fact that E. L. Neeves expresses the emotion of the characters with so much detail that it is easy to recreate those emotions as a reader and put yourself in the shoes of the characters. I love the way happiness is explained in the short sentence, "And then it happened, like sunshine breaking through a cloud, Ellie felt happy. It was not a thought or a memory she experienced, nothing so cerebral. The emotion came from the sum of all her sensory perceptions ..." With this sentence, I could put myself in the scenery and imagine my environment being so overwhelming I can only feel happiness in that instance. A lot of analogies are made to convey emotion as well such as, "But an ephemeral doubt haunted him, like the pea beneath twenty mattresses and twenty feather-beds in Hans Christian Andersen's fairytale..." or, "Ellie felt foolish, embarrassed ... she was nothing but a frightened girl who had climbed on a tall chair to look through a forbidden window but fled as soon as the curtains were opened." Being able to relate a certain simple emotion to a scenario outside of the context of the story was pleasant to read. This, however, makes you feel emotions that are hard to accept. The feelings you have towards characters in the book cannot be helped, and this is in fact due to the thorough explanation of emotion and characters' thoughts.

There are mentions of rape and suicide, so if that is a sensitive issue to you as a reader, I would advise against this book. Besides these sensitive topics, this book is a good read for people who are always longing for more or are questioning where they are in life at the moment. It is also a book I recommend to people who feel they have no choice but to settle for what they have. The book is very well-edited and highly detailed making it easy to follow the plot and the thought of the characters.

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Looking Glass Friends
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