Description
Twenty-five years earlier, in a distant seaside town, a group of teenagers find refuge from their bruising home lives by spending long summer days on an abandoned pier, telling silly jokes, sharing secrets, and committing small acts of rebellion. These lost souls find in each other a reason to get up each morning, a reason to dream, a reason to love.
Out of that summer emerges a transcendent work of art, a painting that will unexpectedly be placed into eighteen-year-old Louisa’s care. She embarks on a surprise-filled cross-country journey to learn how the painting came to be and to decide what to do with it. The closer she gets to the painting’s birthplace, the more nervous she becomes about what she’ll find. Louisa is proof that happy endings don’t always take the form we expect in this stunning testament to the transformative, timeless power of friendship and art.
Book Details
Reviews
View All
5⭐ book 📖5⭐ audiobook 🎧If I could give this book more stars, I would.I was hypnotized by the writing - the author really is an astonishing storyteller.The narrator did an amazing job delivering this book - for the first time, my brain was immediately engaged when listening, switching off the world around me.I cried and laughed and cried again.It's a story of "an endless sea, a great friendship, a true love story."It's a story of coincidences, of broken people with broken lives but with the greatest friendship anyone could ever wish for - a friendship that saves lives and gives hope.It's a story about art, the art of being alive.“I wanted to be able to stop time. So my mom would never lose my dad, so Joar wouldn’t get beaten by his old man, so… so I would never run out of people. Only someone who still has all their people left wants to stop time.”[a:Backman Fredrik|6485178|Fredrik Backman|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1493098924p2/6485178.jpg], you don't just write - "you paint like the birds sing." I struggle to review books I love, because they make me feel so much that it becomes hard to put what I feel into words.
had to DNR at chapter 7 because if I heard the word “fart” one more time I might have lost my mind. concept is there, first 4 chapters were so heartfelt but I’m good on trying to ~lighten the mood~ when the content gets heavy. consider a therapist.
I truly enjoyed the beginning of this book; it made me emotional at some points. However, it was hard to finish because some parts felt repetitive and, at times, quite cheesy. He spends the whole book building up the feeling that something really bad is going to happen to one of the characters, but nothing much actually happens. I found that very underwhelming. By the end, I was just rushing to finish the book and be done with it.