Title: THE POSSIBLE WORLD
Author: Liese O’Halloran Schwarz
Read: March 2022
My Rating: 🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟 all the stars!
Book Description:
It seems like just another night
shift for Lucy, an overworked ER physician in Providence, Rhode Island, until
six-year-old Ben is brought in as the sole survivor from a horrifying crime
scene. He’s traumatized and wordless; everything he knows has been taken from
him in an afternoon. It’s not clear what he saw, or what he remembers.
Lucy, who’s grappling with a personal upheaval of her own, feels a profound,
unexpected connection to the little boy. She wants to help him…but will
recovering his memory heal him, or damage him further?
Across town, Clare will soon be turning one hundred years old. She has long
believed that the lifetime of secrets she’s been keeping don’t matter to anyone
anymore, but a surprising encounter makes her realize that the time has come to
tell her story.
As Ben, Lucy, and Clare struggle to confront the events that shattered their
lives, something stronger than fate is working to bring them together.
My musings:
At what point do you know that you have found an
all-time favourite read? The moment the characters come alive in front of your
eyes, vivid images like people you have known all your life? The moment you lie
awake at night pondering the dilemma the characters find themselves in and
worrying for them? The moment you close the book and feel grief stricken
because these characters won’t be a part of your life any more? It was all of
those and more with Liese O’Halloran Schwarz’s wonderful book THE POSSIBLE WORLD.
I knew very early on that this book spoke directly to my heart and soul, and I
was torn between savouring it and to read greedily to find out all the answers.
Schwarz is a gifted story teller,
who weaves together three separate stories with three unconnected characters
until their lives will converge in a heart breaking moment that will stay with
me for ages yet to come. With her background as an emergency physician, she is
also one of the few authors who can recreate the fictional hospital environment
in a realistic and yet touching way that has none of those eye rolling moments
I have found in other books (shocking asystole, propping up a spinal patient on
a few pillows for comfort, leaving your ICU patient on a ventilator unattended
with visitors walking in and out willy nilly etc).
Where do I even start to tell you
how deeply this book affected me. I adored all characters equally. Little Ben /
Leo, who has survived a horrible trauma. Lucy, the young ED doctor whose career
may have cost her her marriage. Clare, an old lady in a nursing home who
decides to tell her life story, because she owes it to someone from her past.
How do these characters all connect? You will have to read it to find out. At
times, I thought that my heart would surely break! Schwarz points her arrows
right at the heart where our deepest feelings live, and lays them bare.
There really isn’t much more to say, except
that if I could only read one book this year I would choose this one. It will
easily make my list of all-time-favourites and I can’t wait to read more from
this author in future. Now let me deal with my intense book hangover …
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