Thursday 3 January 2019

Book Review - Roar by Cecelia Ahern

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Title: Roar
Author: Cecelia Ahern
Format reviewed: Ebook
Source: Netgalley
Publisher: HarperCollins
Publication Date: 1st November 2018
Rating: 4 Stars


Have you ever imagined a different life?
Have you ever stood at a crossroads, undecided…Have you ever had a moment when you wanted to roar?

From much-loved, international bestseller Cecelia Ahern come stories for all of us: the women who befriend us, the women who encourage us, the women who make us brave. From The Woman Who Slowly Disappeared to The Woman Who Returned and Exchanged her Husband, discover thirty touching, often hilarious, stories and meet thirty very different women. Each discovers her strength; each realizes she holds the power to make a change.

Witty, tender, surprising, these keenly observed tales speak to us all, and capture the moment when we all want to roar.

i really had no idea what to expect from this book. I don't read short story collections often, and it had been a while since I last read a book by  the author. 

Yet from the first story - The Woman Who Slowly Disappeared, I could tell that this is a rather special collection. 

Each story highlights an aspect of life that illuminates a specific quality about a person,  often to the extreme.  The main women in each story tends to nameless, she is the key person but at the same time she could be someone you know.  The odds are you will recognise some of the traits if not in yourself than in your loved ones. 

It is a book that will both make you think and others that will make you smile. A lot of the specifics aren't exactly realistic in how they are portrayed, but at the same time its a fabulous way of make the instance stick in your mind. 

For there is a women and her sisters who literally unravel and fall to pieces,  there is a woman who has been put on a shelf by her husband for her whole life and lives on a shelf.  There is one who due to a birth defect has her heart on her sleeve the whole time - you will know people that have this quality, even if they clearly don't have their heart outside their body. 

There are ticking clocks, overcoming speech impediments there is a woman who loves exchanging everything as she is never happy. 

Some of the stories are quite eye opening and others rather amusing.  Some of them take on a dystopian sort of world where there are new laws to make certain things now illegal, which really makes you think. 

I was reading these perhaps 2 or 3 at a time, over a period of three days and I can quite happily say they are a very cleverly put together set of stories, by what is clearly a highly imaginative and intelligent author, who can see things in a rather unnusual way. 

I'm very pleased to have been able to read this book and it really is all about the power of women.  

Thank you to Netgalley and Harper for this copy which I have reviewed honestly and voluntarily. 

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