Friday, January 25, 2013

The History of Us by Leah Stewart

Reviewed by Laura Kay



Teaching at Harvard is a dream come true for Eloise Hempel, but then she gets a life changing phone call. Her dream life ends, as she takes guardianship of his sister's three children.

Fast forward, as her youngest niece, Claire is about to leave home to pursue her ballet career in New York. Eloise believes now she will able to pursue 'her' life. But Theo and Josh, the two oldest adult children, don't want to move out or move on. They are both stuck. As Eloise is about to throw them out, her mother decides to set up a competition between all of them to see who gets the house.

Eloise has a secret relationship and waiting to pursue her dreams, Theo is dragging her feet to look for a grown-up life and having puppy love for one of Eloise's colleges, Josh is running from his successful music career, and Claire is hiding the most! With all the secrets coming to light everything begins to unravel.

This novel really hit home for me. I got Theo on a number of different levels and issues. It was like no one got how she was still dealing with the loss of her parents all these years later. Eloise is in such a hurry for Theo to leave Cincinnati didn't seem to realize what the home, what the city meant to Theo. It's where her parents left her. In some way I related and understood each character and their motivations. None of them are perfect, none of them are totally likable or not likable. They are a family with all their issues. Not just current issues, but those ones we take with us from our childhood and seem to carry with us into our adulthood. A very character driven story!

I was sad when the book ended. I wanted to keep turning pages and follow them. I wanted to see what was next for each of them. The History of Us is a story of a family and I very much recommend reading it.

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The books we review on this site (A NOVEL REVIEW) are sent to us by publishers, authors or downloaded from Netgalley. This is a very common practice.  We never take payments for these reviews and all the reviews on this site are our own thoughts and feelings and are not influenced.

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