Heart of The Matter

Reviewed by Brenda Seward

There are times when you read a novel and you bond with the characters so completely you feel as if you know them personally. That happened to me as I read, Heart of the Matter, Emily Giffin’s latest novel.
In the opening pages of the novel we find Tessa Russo, a college professor on break from her career to raise her two pre-school children, reflecting on the small, yet significant moments that can become the benchmarks of a person’s life. She is indulging in this reflection as she sits in a restaurant with her husband Nick, an eminent plastic surgeon, on their anniversary. He is about to take a phone call that will significantly alter the course of their seemingly idyllic lives.

On the same night, Valerie Anderson, a lawyer and single mother to her six-year-old son, living in the same upscale Boston suburb as Tessa and Nick is about to receive an equally devastating phone call. The tragic confluence of events that weaves the stories of these two women together is both poignant and real. It is just the kind of odd overlapping that happens in real life, most often to people who seem to have virtually nothing in common, but find their lives suddenly and inexplicably intertwined.

Heart of the Matter is not simply the story of these two women, but the story of how we can all get caught up in the everyday motions of life. In the day to day pursuit of the classic “American dream”, we become blind to what really matters - inflating the superficial out of proportion, focusing on status and style over substance, letting the big things get buried in the minutiae.

The upscale Boston suburb depicted in Giffin’s novel could be set anywhere in America. Those depicted within its pages are like people we all know, dealing with situations we have all struggled with on one level or another. She deftly portrays the complicated relationships and adopted roles that get played out among members of a group or community, and the assumptions we are all prone to make about the people we see on a day to day basis.

Review by Brenda Seward, Owner, Simple Pleasures Books & Gifts

www.simplepleasuresbooksandgifts.com

Heart of the Matter By, Emily Giffin ( also by Giffin: Something Borrowed , Something Blue, Baby Proof and Love the One You’re With). All released by St. Martin Press

Available for sale through Simple Pleasures: http://www.alibris.com/stores/spbooks1 and other bookstores and retailers