Sunday 7 October 2012

Book ~ "Falling in Love" (2012) Stephen Bradlee

From Falling in Love - The Book ~ Sherry Johnson is young, beautiful, bright and athletic. She has everything going for her, except for one thing.

She is addicted to love.

Her life is a vicious circle of nightly trysts and morning regrets.

Her addiction got her kicked out of college, cost her the love of her life and has left her in complete despair.

But still Sherry keeps falling in love. And falling. And falling.

Finally, as Sherry struggles to pull herself up from a bottomless pit, she realizes that she will have to learn to love the one person she has loathed for most of her life.

Herself.

Sherry Johnson hasn't had a nice life.  Her father died when she was a baby and her mother abandoned her to be raised by her mother's unaffectionate sister and too affectionate brother.  The last time she talked with her mother, she was ten and her mother said she'd call her again soon ... but never did.  Sherry spends her life searching for the love she never had.

Her pattern is to get hammered and sleep with men, which she regrets the next day when she wakes up hungover and naked in a strange bed ... which leads her to do it again and again.   She meets and falls in love with Paul but this is destroyed when she continues to "act out" and he discovers who/what she really is.

Sherry moves to New York City looking for her mother's childhood friend, Elaine.  Elaine too is messed up and goes to addiction meetings.  As they become friends, Sherry learns more about her mother.  As Sherry makes a new life in New York, she is constantly battling with herself, thinking she doesn't deserve all the good things and people that come into her life.

The language and actions are definitely for a mature audience.  Despite the subject matter, there are no detailed descriptions.  It is not an erotic novel (like Fifty Shades of Grey, for example) but more the journey of one woman's struggle to fight her addictions and learn to love herself.

I liked the writing style.  The book starts with Sherry being introduced to a writer ... she wants him to tell her story.  The majority of the book is in first person in Sherry's voice.  I enjoyed it.

I received a copy of this ebook from the author at no charge in exchange for my honest review.

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