Hi friends, happy Wednesday – I hope you’re all doing well! Today I’m posting my review of John Boyne’s novel The Heart’s Invisible Furies.

The Heart’s Invisible Furies by: John Boyne: Cyril Avery was adopted from birth, always told he’s not a real Avery, he spends his whole life trying to figure out who he really is. Left to question everything about his existence, as he gets older he begins to question his sexual orientation. After having a crush on his best friend Julian for years he tries to be ‘normal’ but all that does is end up in heartbreak. Will Cyril ever know love and acceptance? Told over the course of one lifetime, is Cyril’s story. This novel was long, yet in the end it felt like it paid off. The reader wasn’t even sure they were going to finish this from the way it started. This started off on a bit of the wrong foot, because we meet one of our characters where she’s being banished from her town because she got pregnant. From there we’re introduced to the main character, where this story basically chronicles his life. We meet his best friend, who at seven years of age, is obsessed with sex, and the main character’s adoptive mother is flirty with him, it’s truly super bizarre and so much of that could have been taken out of the book and this story would have been better for it. The fact that, that was all in the beginning really made it hard to want to continue, but this reader did and wow was this more moving than they anticipated. After reading this and reading a little about the author, the reader could see how the author’s life was represented in the story of our main character. This told the story of being gay in Ireland through these small vignettes of life over the course of a lifetime and it was really effective in its impact. The story dragged at parts and maybe didn’t need to be almost 500 pages long, but it was also fast-moving when plots really got going. The reader also liked the way the stories weaved into one another; how characters would float in and out of stories. The reader knew their connections but the characters didn’t, so that made it even more enjoyable because the reader couldn’t wait for the pay-off of them realizing who was who. The characters had a lot of heart; they also had a lot of built up anger that made them really human and at times relatable. The reader liked some more than others, but they all felt like they had their purpose. In the end, if you can get past the first part of the story, it really opens up into a beautiful, messy, yet authentic story.