Review: Dark, Intense, Thought-Provoking
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 06 26, 2013
With brutal frankness, Fallin in Love takes you deep into the painful world of a young woman who uses mindless, drunken sex as a release valve on her own self-hatred.  Sherry was abandoned by her mother and left in the hands of her cold aunt and abusive uncle.  As a teen she NEEDED to excel in everything, to feel some false semblance of self-worth.  When, in one disastrous moment, fate took what she thought was the most important achievement in her young life away, she spiraled down into an abyss of mental self-abuse, at the hands of others, using sexual promiscuity in her desperate search for what she assumed was love.  As she got older, her addiction to sex became worse, as did her addiction to alcohol, costing her love, self-respect, and pieces of her life lost in a drunken haze.  Sherry became her own worst enemy, her biggest roadblock to recovery.  If not for the strength of the bonds she allowed with a select few she had reluctantly learned to lean on, Sherry would have imploded long ago.  The mountainous road to managing her problems was, in her mind insurmountable and each backslide devastating.  In the end, she learned she had to learn to trust in herself, as well as in those around her in order to end the vicious cycle she was trapped in.Stephen Bradlee has based his novel on a true story, making it all the more heartbreaking to know someone could be so tortured and emotionally crippled because of the callousness of others.  There is no sugar-coating in his writing, it is blunt, intense, stark and lays bare the ugliness of Sherry's undeserved lack of self-esteem.  My personal emotional investment was profound and I found myself not only in awe of Sherry's unrealized inner strength, but hoping she would learn to see it, too.I want to thank Stephen Bradlee for the opportunity to read and review Falling in Love