miss_mesmerized
Olly, Ash and Miller have grown up together. In their community, they have always been perceived as a unit which nobody could intrude. In their small East Coast town, life is easy in the 1950s and dream are big. Forty years later, things are different. None is left of their friendship, Olly is on his own, now also without a job and Ash and Miller are negotiating their separation. It is Olly’s aunt Tassie that cannot stay any longer in her care home that brings them together again. It is not easy to confront the past, especially while watching a young threesome bunch repeating their mistakes. I totally adored Liza Klaussmann’s novel “Tigers in Red Weather” and thus was eager to read her latest novel “This is Gonna End in Tears”. She did not disappoint, quite the contrary, the story is the perfect read for a hot summer where you sense that it needs some escalation to be able to breathe again. Full of suspense even though it is not a mystery, you read on to find out how all the tension between the characters will finally dissolve. “Well, that was the point, what he’d only recently realized: there is no point; everyone thinks they’re the hero of their own story, when actually there’s no story at all. Just an outline that gets filled in with nonsense and accidents and happenstance and luck. And the, well... and then nothing.” What I appreciated most was how the author detailed the characters. They are all unique in their disappointments of life, in their mixed emotions and inability to actually speak about what goes on in their mind. The atmosphere profits from this, you feel that something must happen, that they cannot just go on like this. It is a novel about friendship and dreams and expectations of life, about creative minds and everyday chore, about bonds that are strong and bonds that can feel like handcuffs. An intoxicating read from the first page which I could hardly put down.
