Monday, March 14, 2011

Mad Love by Suzanne Selfors



Mad Love by Suzanne Selfors
Release Date – January 4, 2011
Publisher – Walker Books for Young Readers
Pages - 323
My Rating- 7/10

Here is the synopsis from GoodReads
When you're the daughter of the bestselling Queen of Romance, life should be pretty good. But 16-year-old Alice Amorous has been living a lie ever since her mother was secretly hospitalized for mental illness. After putting on a brave front for months, time is running out. The next book is overdue, and the Queen can't write it. Alice needs a story for her mother—and she needs one fast.
That's when she meets Errol, a strange boy who claims to be Cupid, who insists that Alice write about the greatest love story in history: his tragic relationship with Psyche. As Alice begins to hear Errol's voice in her head and see things she can't explain, she must face the truth—that she's either inherited her mother's madness, or Errol is for real.

When I picked up Mad Love I was not sure what to expect. I thought it would be a cute love story. I couldn’t have been more wrong. There is a love story element to it, but it’s
more than that. It was much more serious that I was expecting.

We meet Alice Amorous after her mother has been in the hospital for awhile. Alice is taking care of the house, paying bills, and lying to everyone about where her mother really is. I felt for Alice. She had to grow up and take care of everything and she was only a teenager. I liked that she was different from most girls in novels. She was extremely capable of taking care of herself.

I was happy to see that it took Alice quite awhile to believe Errol. In most novel that have a supernatural element the heroine ends up believing the vampire/werewolf/etc and falling in love with him rather quickly. Alice not only thought Errol was crazy but thought she had the same mental illness as her mother.

The other characters in the novel that I enjoyed were Tony and Realm. Realm’s story got to me. I was really rooting for her in the end (even if I didn’t like some of the things she did). I felt she was really flushed out and at time even more interesting than Alice

The issue with me was that the story didn’t stay with me. It was one of the those quick reads that you forget about once finished. I didn’t feel strongly for any of the characters. I felt like they were kept at a distance and that we didn’t get ‘past the surface” with some of them. I found it especially hard to connect, or really get a picture of Errol.

In the end, the author does have a great underlining message about mental illness which I felt was important, however, the characters were hard to relate to.

1 comment:

  1. I wonder what the underlining message is about mental illness. after taken the abnormal class, this books sounds like it might be very interesting. It might just be my love for anything psychology.

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