One thought on “Eleanor”

1. MY BLOG Melissa Martin s Reading ListThis book started out so deep and sad I could feel each person s depression and grief It was real and it was hard The story goes goes through different times The years jump ahead to each person in the family and it all comes back around in the end We start out with Eleanor, she has a husband named Hob and a little girl named Agnes Eleanor fights depression and other things because she was swimming her way into the Olympics but she got pregnant and never got b [...]

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2. Every once in awhile, a book will come along that changes how I feel about the fiction I consume Raises the bar, as it were Eleanor is one of those books that makes me consider how I ve rated books in the past Based on how much I loved this book, I ve obviously rated some books five stars when they haven t deserved them Because this one is now high on my list of the best novels I ve had the pleasure of reading Definitely it is in my top ten Eleanor takes a detailed and unflinching look at grief [...]

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3. The fantastical elements of this novel don t really start until around page 80, but really they are what make it special Up until then, it was of a novel of a family and the loss of a child, something I felt I had read, but then it morphs and shifts into a much engaging story of the afterlife and twin connections, grief and healing, and the power of dreams The writing of these other worlds, other presences, is descriptive and beautiful The real world is logically sad and difficult for Eleanor. [...]

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4. Easily among the best books I ll read this year, if not 1 This is one of those books that will stick with me for a long time to come, and it ll be difficult to move on to something else.This is the story of a young lady, Eleanor, that lived through the tragedy of the death of her twin several years earlier, her parents reactions and how they fell into their own worlds of mourning and loss, and the impact it has on Eleanor A magical story of loss, recovery, and ultimately, love regained.Highly re [...]

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5. I have had a very contentious relationship with this book over the past two days One minute I loved it and the next minute I wanted to throw it across the room Love, throw, repeat I found the characterization to be superb and that is a very important element to me Gurley managed to put me right there inside Eleanor s heart and mind She s brave and strong and living a life that no child should ever have to, and at the same time she s this vulnerable young girl at the mercy of something far beyond [...]

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6. Love the cover No spoilers here.This book starts out sad and emotional after terrible tragedies befall the family Then it starts to get a little confusing as not all of the information you need to know is revealed right away As the story progresses, it does unfold through the main characters and jumps back and forth in time This novel is not particularly gripping but surreal, complex and well written It is like nothing I ve ever read but did remind me a bit of the movie What Dreams May Come.If y [...]

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7. Shortness of breath the doctor had asked her Muscle tension Mental distraction She looked down at her hands and nodded Yes, to each of those things Hearing them described so simply should have robbed them of their power, she thought they were only words But instead, she felt as if she should defend them No, she would say It s so much They re so much bigger than just those words.Eleanor is the story of two women with the same name, related but a generation apart.Eleanor, the first, is a young wi [...]

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8. This was such a wonderful novel, mystical and heart wrenching a really pleasant surprise.This story is told through the eyes of three generations of women Firstly we see Eleanor as she struggles with married life and the knowledge of another child on the way We then skip ahead in time to Agnes, the daughter of Eleanor as she fights depression with alcohol after the death of one of her own children And lastly we follow Agnes s remaining daughter also named Eleanor as she tries to live without her [...]

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9. Eleanor is a tough book to rate on a star level The writing is eloquent and emotionally staggering His world is profoundly imaginative and the scope of the story quite impressive to see unfold The story begins with a wife and mother who is depressed about how her dream of becoming an Olympic swimmer had to die when she became a mother This struggle between personal dreams and family hit me personally, and is one of many instances where I applaud Mr Gurley for his ability to evoke emotional inves [...]

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10. This is a really well thought out and fascinating literary novel touching on complex subjects including, but not limited to, post traumatic stress syndrome, depression, alcoholism, and grief It s a story you ll think about for days after you finish with an ending that can be interpreted in many different ways.

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11. Eleanor Witt s life and family will begin to implode when she is six Firstly Eleanor will lose her best friend and identical twin Esmerelda in a tragic accident For Eleanor s mother Agnes this is a double blow after the mysterious disappearance of her mother two decades earlier after going swimming on a moonless night at Anchor Bend With Eleanor the only reminder to the past, her mother grows to despise her and slowly falls apart.Years later and now in her teens, Eleanor can see the devastating [...]

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12. Adored this I m due to review for the blog tour so will copy that here then But this was wonderful Different and wonderful.

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13. I m going to have a nearly impossible time reviewing this one This book defies genre to give a heartbreaking look at the effects of grief through generations The writing was beautiful able to be both ethereal and harsh It s definitely one I ll continue to think about for some time after finishing.

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14. I liked the first 70 or so pages of this story of grief suffered by three successive generations of a family The grief was well written, and it was easy to see how decisions made in one generation could affect the following generations Then the author brought in the fantastical elements, and I was okay with that, even enjoyed them at first But by page 180 all I could think was, I get the point I understand part of the puzzle of the fantastic stuff The story moves back and forth between character [...]

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15. I liked the premises of course It s my name, I had a twin in utero, my family s pretty messed up etc , but mehVery bleak setting, bickering, PTSD, absence of any kind of thought on oneself, life, family Absence of joy, caring, love Ok Then it gets worse The accident scene is foreshadowed to an inch of its life.Then a kid who buys way too much into Karpman s triangle victim, savior, persecutor scenario punishes one parent while masochistically supporting the other one who symbolically and repeate [...]

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16. Jason Gurley s writing is excellent, but this book only halfway worked for me I loved the parts about Eleanor and her family s history, and all the ways that their individual suffering intertwined and manifested throughout the generations Unfortunately, too much of the book instead focused on the Rift and the dream worlds, which I found tedious While the details of the alternate worlds clicked into predictable place near the end, nearly four hundred pages is much too long to spend dragging throu [...]

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17. I had to put this book down when I first started it Was it because it was bad No, no not at all It is because I had read so many emotionally hard hitting books in a row that I couldn t do another one It would have just messed with me too badly.I did pick it up after reading something else much less serious And it was a good call By doing that I was able to fully enjoy this book for what it is a book that is going to hit you hard in your emotional gut.This book is kind of hard to explain It is mo [...]

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18. Time is a river, and it flows in a circle.A beautifully written and heartbreaking novel about a family ripped apart by grief It also deals with the complicated relationships between mothers and daughters I enjoyed many parts of this story, but by the end, this magical realism tale got a little too fantastic for me.Esmerelda s death split their family as finely as an atom, and the resulting detonation blinded them all.1985 Six year old Eleanor s family is destroyed when her twin sister Esmerelda [...]

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19. Eleanor is powerful and emotionally raw Jason Gurley delivers a story that is both heartbreaking and thought provoking all at once This one is full of deep symbolism and imagery, and will take you on a journey of sadness and anger, entwined in a fantasy world The Plot Eleanor begins in the year 1962 centered around Eleanor, her husband Hob, and her daughter Agnes We witness, what we know in this day and age, to be depression in Eleanor In 1963 Eleanor goes for a swim in the ocean, never to retur [...]

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20. There is a nasty little secret that each parent has, but thinks is theirs alone The world wants us to believe that normal people never feel ambivalent about parenthood That mixture of regret and joy, of resentment and overwhelming love And above all the certainty that no matter how hard you try, you ll never be good enough Or the terror that no amount of love will be able to cover your deficiencies We don t talk about it But Eleanor does.Ostensibly, it s the story of a young girl who is overcomi [...]

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21. This is one of those books that it s easier to review by writing about what it is not, than what it is.It s not Neil Gaiman but it s almost that good , it s not typically YA despite the teenage protagonists , it s not easily categorised it s somewhere between metaphysics, magic and uhh, time travel, along with a really vivid depiction of a family failing to deal with grief and completely falling apart.And it is very, very, very good.If I had access to physical copies of this book, I would probab [...]

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22. Identical twins, Eleanor and Esmerelda, are torn apart, one taken from the world we know and one left to pick up the pieces Their family is torn apart with grief But that grief may have started in their family long before this tragedy This is a deep look at the healing of a damaged family in what has to be one of the most unique ways I ve ever read It will open your eyes to the possibility of realities other than we are aware of.This is a fantasy with quite a unique take on the theories of space [...]

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23. I didn t really know what to expect when I first picked up Eleanorby Jason Gurley it was listed as Adult Literary Fiction, yet had sci fi and fantastical elements I wasn t very confident that these genres could mix well together.But they do.Eleanor was simply beautifully crafted the writing, the characters, and especially the themes It was an excellent, honest portrayal of grief, motherhood, mental illness, and the power of second chances The concept was also very well done and extremely unique. [...]

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24. Gurley s new novel combines family tragedy with magical realism to create a beautiful and haunting page turner of a story.Eleanor loses her twin sister in a horrible accident that leaves her family in tatters Left to take care of herself and her grief stricken mother strange things start happening to Eleanor that she can t understand or explain These events will cause a ripple effect for generations of her family It is an engrossing fantastical novel about grief and the choices we make and the e [...]

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25. This is an excellent book about how one event can change everything It took me a while because I kept hitting sad parts and I had to put it down It is also fantasy and some of the settings are inside dreams It s about how Agnes mother disappeared when she was a small child and how everything spiraled out of control from that point forward How do you help someone that has never been happy Someone that has been sad since before you were ever born I don t want to give anything away You ll just have [...]

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26. Eleanor erz hlt die Geschichte einer Familie ber drei Generationen hinweg und besticht vor allem durch fantastische, fast schon magische Elemente W hrend die ersten 80 Seiten noch sehr real sind und es vor allem um Trauer, Depression und Wut der Protagonistinnen geht, flechtet der Autor von dort an magische Elemente in die Geschichte, was eigentlich ja genau mein Ding ist Trotzdem hatte ich einige Schwierigkeiten, das Buch f r mich richtig einzuordnen und ich habe lange dar ber nachgedacht, ob u [...]

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27. I cover judged this book The water and the way Eleanor scrawls across the cover were selling points for me, but I didn t understand the girl on the cover.Needless to say, this book was than I thought There is definitely than meets the eye.There s one important actually two details that are left out of the synopsis The story is about a young girl named Eleanor, but the story really starts with her namesake, her grandmother Eleanor.Grandmother Eleanor gave up everything the Olympics, swimming, h [...]

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28. A highly unusual, yet beautiful read by emerging author Jason Gurley exploring death, grief, second chances, and ultimatelywe think hope What comes across on the back jacket is a family drama through the eyes of a young girl Eleanor It s an explosive dive quite literally into the watery torrents that is our family They are all grieving, for various reasons and it isn t just a death we re talking about here But then the back jacket becomes a bit waterlogged, at least for me We re thrust into a st [...]

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29. Time is a river, and it flows in a circle I love you This was a book that I picked up on a whim and boy am I glad I did Eleanor written by Jason Gurley is quite simply an amazing read Even though it contains fantasy elements, categorizing this novel as just fantasy would be a mistake If anything this book is about grief and the sadness and depression that can accompany it It deals with loss in a very interesting way and although it seems a little generic at first, it transforms into something mu [...]

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30. This is not a book to read if you are looking for a fun, fluffy story This novel is deep, devastating, and depressing The characters are wonderfully developed, and the reader can feel the emotions and devastation behind both girls The story actually made me cry Throughout the entire book, the writing was very well crafted, and I loved the two different time lines that we got to see the different characters in It reminded me of one of my favorite books Everything I Never Told You by Celeste Ng, a [...]

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