Review: Beautiful, perfect book
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 06 19, 2014
Anyone who even remotely knows me is aware of how overly-excited I’ve been for The Life You Left and Carmel Harrington yet again blew me away with this fabulous book.Right away this book captured my attention as we hear about a mysterious email sent to Sarah from her husband Paul, saying he wasn’t coming home that night. In what could have been an intriguing story on its own, The Life You Left had much more of an edge to it than that with the fascinating addition of Sarah’s guardian angel Edward. I loved this concept and the way it affected Sarah’s everyday life and I was always interested in Edward’s role as Sarah tried to rebuild her life and support her family.I also loved Carmel’s wonderful character development. Not only does she bring us a fab main character in Sarah, one who was really easy to like and empathise with, there’s a brilliant cast of supporting characters. Sarah’s brother James was my favourite supporting character – I loved his relationship with Sarah and how supportive he was of her. Carmel always writes side characters which you know would be capable of having a brilliant book themselves and I felt like that about Ruby and James amongst others.After a great start to this book, I loved how it just kept getting better. The Life You Left had everything – from family, love, protectiveness to more harder-hitting and sensitive issues. I really connected with Sarah in this novel and her wonderful, strong personality makes her probably my favourite leading character in any book I can remember reading. Her care for her family and even for people she doesn’t know all that much, plus the way she always picked herself back up and fought for the people she loved made her a really fantastic, inspirational character.I have been waiting very impatiently for The Life You Left and it definitely did not disappoint! Carmel packed plenty into this simply stunning novel and wrote it to perfection.5/5.*Book gifted for honest review.