I received a free copy of this book via NetGalley in return for an honest review.

I unexpectedly loved Louise O'Neill's Only Ever Yours, so I was curious to see how she writes in a contemporary setting.

This is not a love story. It is a psychological deconstruction of obsessive love. Sarah, the refreshingly unlikable female protagonist, has every self-obsessed naive character flaw I think every woman can recognise in themselves. Switching between 'Now' and 'Then' and the two men Sarah loves charts a novel through the mundane despair of a single-sided relationship.

"Sarah couldn't imagine what that felt like, to see a man as a source of love rather than needing him to take care of her."

O'Neill is a deft, sharp writer, able to pinprick every emotional tide and flow but also convey the Irish dialogue and dialect without descending into parody. I devoured this in one sitting, and I look forward to reading more of her honest, feminist understanding of young women.

Honestly I just didn’t like this story, the main character Sarah was just so unlikeable. It made it really hard to feel any empathy towards her.

Raw, honest and exposing, Almost Love delves into the politics of relationships, pulling it apart strand by painful strand. A fantastic, hard-hitting book highlighting the dangers of toxic, obsessive love that reads as truthfully and lyrically as O'Neill's other books. Authentic, flawed and above all real main character that resonates with all women tired of people loving the male anti-hero and constantly questioning female characters "likeability".

Things are not going too well between Sarah and her partner. Is it just because her job as a teacher exhausts and frustrates her? She is an artist, but has never been good enough to really succeed with her paintings, not like her mother-in-law to be or her best friend. When she flees their home one afternoon, she by coincidence meets Matthew and all comes up again. The man she loved like never before, the man she would have given up everything for – the man she has given up everything for and destroyed so much. But he is still Matthew and there is something in her that makes the old feeling, she thought she had overcome, show up again.

After reading the blurb, I expected a story with an unhealthy love addiction and intense feelings on the part of the female protagonist. I was quite sure to feel compassion for her obsessive love and what it makes with her, yet, I mainly hated Sarah, even more than Matthew, which made it a bit difficult to really enjoy the novel.

So, why didn’t I feel pity for her? First of all, she is incredibly arrogant. When still young, her best friend from university gets the big chance of an exhibition, but instead of being happy for him, she envies him and is convinced that it should have been her. Second, her father obviously is quite lonely in their remote village and he always tries not to put her under pressure and to tolerate her awful behaviour, but she treats him like an old imbecile. Yes, he might not have been the perfect dad when her mother died – yet, he also lost his beloved wife and needed time for himself and his grief. Her school friends are just places she can dump her personal dramas, she doesn’t care about their problems and feelings and even doesn’t realise when she spoils her former best friend’s wedding. The current relationship is marked by her evil behaviour towards her boyfriend. No, he cannot do anything right, she only snaps at him and looks down on him. All of this is not necessarily linked to her obsessive love, not, she is just a very mean person.

When it comes to her flashbacks and memories of the time with Matthew, well, it is the classic constellation: a successful man in the middle of his life meets the naive girl who falls for him and somehow she succumbs to the illusion that he might also fall in love with her. Her whole behaviour – bombarding him with text messages, dropping everything when he calls, accepting all his wishes in their shabby hotel room, being subservient in any imaginable way – well, that’s something that might happen, but over months without understanding what is going on? That she is never at his side in public, but hidden in a hotel room where he doesn’t even have the time for a proper conversation with her? At least, she can serve as a cautionary tale.

I am not sure if I find Sarah’s character authentic and thus could really believe the story. Nevertheless, it captivated me somehow and I almost read it in just one sitting which definitely speaks for Louise O’Neill.

I've read some of Louise O'Neill's YA novels and really enjoyed them, but this was something very different. Almost Love explores the destructive side of relationships and the way that unresolved issues can linger and fester, even in seemingly healthy partnerships. The book uses two timelines to tell Sarah's story - one, 'Then', showing the toxic relationship she had with an older man when she was in her early twenties, and the other, 'Now', showing how that relationship, long over, continues to impact on Sarah's life.

Sarah is an unflinchingly real character, and as such is often unlikeable. She can be selfish and unkind, thoughtless and reckless. But that is where the power of this novel lies. In the gritty reality of Sarah, you see the undeniable truth of the long lasting effect that a manipulative and abusive relationship can have.

As a big fan of Louise O'Neil I was really interested to read Almost Love.

it was quite a compelling read and I sped through it in just a couple of days, but unfortunately as addicted to it as I was I can't say I really enjoyed it.

Sarah is a very unlikable character, which isn't always a huge issue but her motives of why she acts as she does is very unclear. She often relates back to her mum dying young and whilst that is pretty tragic, it doesn't really explain how she became so selfish and her obsession with Brennan seems extreme and pretty unrealistic.

I did enjoy the writing style though, with the use of Irish slang and talk of art, it is not something I often read about so it was interesting to hear about that and also the mention of race in Ireland was interesting.

Sarah should be happy; she has a loving boyfriend, a lovely house, a job she loves and the means to pursue her art. But she’s haunted by an affair with Matthew which consumed her whole life; she loved him, even though he was twenty years older than her and only ever wanted to see her in secret. She lost friends, the respect of her father and her job, all because of her obsession… so why can’t she forget him? And love is supposed to hurt, isn’t it?

I am a big fan of Louise O’Neill’s cutting feminist fiction; she’s not afraid to create dark, complicated characters and to let them hurt and fail and fuck up. Sarah is not particularly likeable, and her decisions are, at times, maddening, but as you follow along with her disastrous affair and the way it sends shockwaves through her life, you’ll find yourself hoping for the best for Sarah, anyway. I think a lot of the power of this book is in the fact that Sarah is quite unlikeable, but you can still see the ways in which unhealthy narratives about love and women have worked their way into her brain, and the ways in which Matthew abuses his power and privilege over her to get what he wants.

It’s not my favourite Louise O’Neill book - I think Only Ever Yours is burned into my soul - but she is very good at what she does, and this book is almost as addictive as the affair it depicts. Just don’t hold out too much hope for a happy ending…

I was very excited to read this book as I have heard extremely positive things about the author and her writing. This book was at times extremely difficult read, it was thought provoking and I couldn't it out of my head for hours afterwards. The main character is not particularly likeable but I honestly don't think she is meant to be. This is a very different book and not one I will forget for a long time but I did enjoy it. O'Neill is a very talented author and will undoubtedly continue to create challenging and thought provoking material.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publishers for this ARC.

Let me start by saying that a lot of readers complained about the main character, about her selfishness and how badly she treats the people around her, and how in the end it affected their reading experience. Well, I liked Sarah. I tried to see past the Matthew drama, the book mainly focuses around, and try to understand Sarah and her reasons, for being the way she was portrayed in the book.

I'll try my best at explaining my empathy towards Sarah. I feel like I need to defend this character so badly. Personally, I see Matthew as the trigger. Sarah's life was messy way long before she met him. Her relationship with her parents or lack of, the bitter school years, the unrealistic expectations from her as an artist, academic pressure, social status and financial situation, I think they are solid examples. But it's easy to blur it all out and leave it in the background, when you’re still hopeful about life. But then Matthew happens. This rich and powerful man takes an interest in her. Obviously it makes her feel good about herself, until it all blows up in her face. You think you have to deal with life after break up, but actually you realise it wasn’t even a break up, because you didn’t mean enough. So deal with the lie you convinced yourself it’s true, on top of everything, while everyone around you moves on with their happy lives.

I think O’Neill tried to realistically capture how it feels when you are at your lowest point in life. How frustration gets a hold on you. How stuck you are in your own misery and hopelessly try to get out of it by any means necessary. And mostly how illogically you start thinking.
There are a lot of buried issues inside this character, and I felt like most of them remain unresolved. I really wish the book had a different ending, more closure for the readers.

It would have been a 5/5 stars book for me, honestly. I’m pretty impressed with this book and I could relate to tiny bits of it. I know how it feels to be stuck while life happens to the people around. Unfortunately, I couldn’t connect with it the way I wanted to.

Don’t expect fast-paced action. Also, the book is divided in THEN and NOW chapters, and the plot keeps switching from past to present. I liked it, but at times it felt confusing, I had to re-check if it's a THEN or a NOW chapter. But it’s definitely worth a read, and I’m planning on keeping an eye out for Louise O’Neill.

Despite this book being uncomfortable reading at times, I nonetheless found myself getting increasingly drawn into the story the more I read. The style of writing was very addictive and the way the story flips between ‘then’ and ‘now’ had me turning the pages at record speed. I couldn’t wait to find out how the story would end although I would’ve liked a bit more ‘closure’ on what happened to Matthew especially as the author so successfully made me despise him!
Sarah isn’t a particularly likeable character however this didn’t spoil my enjoyment of the book. I thought it was a very realistic portrayal of how selfish & self centred people can get when faced with an obsessively toxic relationship. This is the first book I’ve read by this author but I’ll definitely be reading more in future. I would highly recommend this book.

Thank you to NetGalley and Quercus Books for allowing me to read this book in exchange for an honest review.

There is no doubt that Louise O'Neill is a brilliant writer. In Sarah, she presents a protagonist who in many ways is a terrible person, and yet I recognised so many of her thought processes. The urge towards self-sabotage, the toxic view of what love and relationships should be, the intense but incoherent wanting – in my early twenties, I could have been Sarah. And I understand, too, the shock of going from best in class – special, the one destined for greatness – to just a reasonably talented person among other talented people. I recognise the impulse to give up rather than fail. Sarah is selfish and cruel and thoughtless. In some ways, she's still a child. But she's very real. She doesn't make for easy reading, but she makes an impact. Here's to more complicated, not-nice female characters from Louise O'Neill in future.

The third book I've read by O'Neill, and maybe the best of them. I cried, felt like screaming at the pages, and ultimately spent a lot of time mulling over the issues that O'Neill talks about. Switching back between the past and the present, and Sarah's relationships with vastly different, but still equally negative, men, O'Neill talks about the problems arising from abusive and manipulative relationships in a raw, realistic way that she is so known for. Sarah is an amazing main character, strong but relatable, a woman who you would never think to be in such a horrific position. I loved this, and I can't recommend it more.

This book broke me, quite literally. I have rarely had such a visceral reaction to a book as I had this time and I am quite unsure how to talk about it. For this very reason, I feel the need to start this review with a disclaimer: I saw so much of myself in the main character and her experiences and behaviours that I cannot be objective about the literally merit of this book but I can say with absolutely certainty that the emotional core of this book was intense.

Told in two timelines, then and now, this book traces Sarah’s twenties. The past is told in first-person and tells of her increasingly destructive relationship to Matthew Brennan, a man many years her senior who treats her abysmally. The present is told in third person, Sarah is in a new relationship but still as ever self-hating and increasingly horrible to everybody around her. We closely follow Sarah, who is in no way an easy person to spend time with, and are always privy to her self-destructive thoughts and tendencies in a way that I found highly effective and extremely claustrophobic. Sarah is, for lack of a better term, a mess. For me the past narrative work better; the intimate first person narration made it a difficult but rewarding experience; present day did not quite hold my interest at all times but managed to show just how broken Sarah is in a way that made my heart hurt.

Louise O’Neill shines an unflinching light on why a person might stay in a toxic situation way longer than they would have ever thought beforehand. Matthew is a horribly disinterested in Sarah as a person except for brief interludes when he wants sex. The sex scenes are uncomfortable to no end, Matthew showing less than zero interest in making the experience pleasurable for Sarah who does not feel like she can tell him to stop. He belittles her and makes her feel bad for being the person she is. These scenes hit me incredibly hard: In my second and third year of uni, I dated this gorgeous, brilliant, funny Norwegian with the most beautiful accent when he spoke German with me – and who never let me forget that I am not the kind of person he wants to spend the rest of his life with (too feminist, too vegetarian, too not blond enough, too abrasive, too not feminine enough and so on) or maybe I never let him forget that he was not the person I wanted to grow old with (this might very well be true as well, relationships are rarely as one-sided as I would like to make this one seem). O’Neill captures the particular heartbreak that comes from a relationship like this incredibly well. While this made for a very difficult reading experience for me, it also impressed me to no end. I am so very glad to have read this.

So difficult to read but so very necessary. I actually cringed reading some parts as it was so raw and so so real. This book woke me up a little to stop some dysfunctional behavior myself. I absolutely loved it and recommend at 100%

Wow. I really didn't know what to expect from this, and after the first chapter I was tempted to give up. I am so, SO glad that I didn't.

What followed was a raw, well written story of all kinds of love, and I myself fell in love too. A brilliant read - highly recommended.

Almost Love

I was kindly given a review copy of this book from Netgalley in return for my views.

I requested this novel, having read Louise O’Neill’s previous books, Asking for It and Only Ever Yours. All three novels are designed to get us thinking - the main characters are very realistic and not always likeable and O’Neill comes at the storylines from a feminist perspective encouraging us to explore our own - culturally constructed - ideas of femininity, friendship and consent.

In contrast to her previous novels, which were broadly categorised as Young Adult novels, Almost Love is firmly set in the adult world. Sarah, a young Art teacher in a private school sees herself as a failed artist - not helped by her best friend Fionn’s massive success. This sense of failure permeates her entire life, and when a rich and powerful parent of one of her students shows an interest in her, she grabs it with both hands.

What follows is Sarah’s idea of a love story. She does her absolute utmost to keep Matthew happy, assuming that what will happen is her own happy ending. In the meantime she is neglecting every other relationship in her life - as readers we see what she is doing to herself and others and know this happy ending will never happen.

Of course, it’s easy to see Matthew as the villain of the piece. Although Sarah is not perfect - and does some pretty horrible things to those around her - he is the one taking advantage of her. Isn’t he?

What O’Neill does cleverly in her presentation of the characters is leave us questioning our own experience of the world. In describing Sarah and Matthew’s sexual encounters she describes how unfulfilling Sarah finds it - how she has sex with Matthew when she doesn’t want to, in ways she doesn’t enjoy. In fact sex with Matthew leaves her hating herself and feeling worthless. This is an experience many women can empathise with I’m sure. We have been conditioned to believe that all that is important is to be nice and to keep everyone else happy - and Sarah shows how ultimately this is a mistake. Matthew is clear from the start that he is not interested in a relationship with her, that he doesn’t have time for anything more than sex - this is absolutely clear to us as readers throughout. However Sarah cannot see it.

The novel jumps around in time - although this is sometimes confusing, it has that uncomfortable inevitability that this narrative style allows. I believe that Asking for It had a similar structure. Essentially we know from the start that there is no happy ending from Sarah. It leaves you wanted to shake her every time she makes a terrible decision. However, O’Neill is not about making characters we like - she’s about showing us that real people make real mistakes and that we shouldn’t make assumptions about others.

This novel is a good - but uncomfortable - read.

My first Louise O’Neill book and wasn’t sure what to expect.
It’s a raw, hard look at Sarah’s current and past relationships. Sarah herself comes across as self centred, self obsessed and uses people to suit herself. When she gets caught up with Matthew, a man 20 years her senior, the tables turn and she is used and this sets her on a course of destruction. We also see her current relationship with Oisin which eventually disintegrates.
An honest and unflinching look at abusive relationships. Worth a read.

ARC provided by NetGalley in exchange for an honest review

Louise O'Neill is one of those authors whose prose and style I admire immensely whilst almost universally hating their stories. So I was surprised and pleased by how addictive I found Almost Love. Whereas with The Surface Breaks and Only Ever Yours, I found the author's brand of feminism to be unnuanced and very 90s in the way that men were portrayed as the source of all evil, rather than acknowledging that the system was broken and needed rebuilding, Almost Love was far more layered.

The MC, Sarah, is dissatisfied in a teaching job having given up on her dreams if being an artist - partly out of a fear of failure and partly out of this perverse perspective that she has to win at life and if she's not winning then she won't play. Life has held no great adventure or grande passion for her. Instead if going out and making something happen, she waits for adventure to happen to her. Enter older man, Matthew Brennan. Sarah falls in love with him. She also falls in hate with him. In fact, any kind of uncontrolled descent you can have over another person, Sarah has it covered here. Suddenly there's drama and adventure and a seedy sort of glamour. Somehow she tells herself that this is right no matter how badly he treats her, because if it doesn't hurt, if it doesn't scar you, it's not really love. Here's the thing, as appalling as that sounds, it's really common amongst women especially in their teens and twenties. It's not stupidity. We're socially conditioned to turn our own wants and needs inward, to value ourselves based on how others perceive us. A romantic prospect that reflects the perceived 'truth' that we don't deserve more back at us, that tests our ability to abnegate in all situations, is toxic and addictive. It's a disturbing cycle that stimulates the risk reward part of our brains and the more the reward is withheld, the harder we try to win it. Not all cases are as extreme as Sarah's. But show me a woman who at some point hasn't waited for a romantic partner to realise that they are worth more that said partner's treatment of them reflects. And that's the huge problem. Even now, there is far too much emphasis on teaching girls to be nice, which is literally a way of saying 'appropriate' - behave in a manner appropriate to your assigned gender. Girls are taught to take up the least amount of space they can manage, to be good, to be quiet, to be ladylike (whatever the hell that actually means). To not want. All of which is a potent brew taken daily throughout childhood and girlhood, resulting in not knowing what your value is.

We should be teaching girls to value themselves first before we teach them anything else. We should be teaching them that their value is not linked to their looks or figures or pleasant manner. Or to their ability to self efface or be different (special!) compared to other girls. We should definitely be teaching girls that their worth comes from knowing that merely by existing they are enough and that male regard is not a metric to measure worth by.

And that is essentially where Sarah starts from in this book. There have been parts of her childhood that have made her double down on not valuing herself too but really this attitude was imbibed early and strengthened with age.

However, Sarah responds to all of this, to her poor relationship with her father and the way Matthew treats her, by becoming a small, self centred, embittered and egocentric person. She spreads her misery around, making friends and family and anyone who cares for her as unhappy as she is. If anyone calls her on it, it's not her fault 'because her father' or 'because Matthew'. She's utterly unlikable and yet completely compelling. Perhaps this is what O'Neill does best - she takes those parts of being raised as a girl - all the shit we think we've conquered if we're well adjusted - and reflects it back at us in an extreme form. You're not meant to like her MCs. You're meant to think 'god, am I like that at all?'

Obviously Sarah's actions cannot be excused by her childhood or by being badly treated by a man she thinks she loves (debatable since what she seems to get out of that is confirmation that she's not worth better - in short a clear goal to aspire to, at the end of which awaits a Cinderella type reward). It's clear that she's cruel and unkind and selfish and we're not meant to excuse her for that. But the book does twist her character journey around so that she seems to be reaching a place of greater wisdom by the end. Nothing is solved but she goes back and faces her fears however unwillingly.

There's a lot to unpack in this book in terms of themes. I think it's the best of the author's work. And as usual beautifully written with deep characters. Everyone has faults but it was good to see a mix of good, bad and indifferent men here too. And I do get the whole 'Fionn was too nice for her' thing. So many of us get offered a really decent partner before we can appreciate ourselves enough to believe we deserve one. Pretty sure I've used 'too nice' as a reason someone was unsuitable myself as a teen.

This isn't a love story. Don't be fooled by the title. This is messy, gritty and it doesn't have a happy ending. It is still an exceptional book.

This is a though one for me to review. Almost Love follows Sarah’s two relationships, both problematic for different reasons, each one of them reminding me of one of the two relationships I’ve had. I didn’t think the book was amazing, I didn’t particularly like Sarah or any of the other characters, but this is what did it for me. This is the first thing that has got through to me, lots of Sarah’s feelings were what I felt, things I felt were my fault and overreactions, dramatic, me not being mature enough. This is the first book that not only made me feel like someone got it and has experienced what I have (with some slight differences here and there) but it made me feel like it wasn’t my fault, when friends, professionals and plenty other books weren’t able to get that message across to me. If that isn’t enough to earn a 5 star rating, I don’t know what is.

A dark but very honest and raw book about unhealthy love, and the lasting impact and damage it can cause, Almost Love by Louise O'Neill is not always an easy read, but at the same time it is a book that I found hard to put down.
Almost Love is the story of Sarah, a frustrated artist turned teacher who falls for a powerful and charismatic older man, and when she falls, she falls hard. She loses all sense of herself and her self worth, and allows the man to use and abuse her, while her friends and family look on in disbelief and even disgust when she betrays her closest and dearest friend. Tawdry meetings in seedy hotel rooms because of the need for secrecy are enough for only so long, and when Sarah begins to ask for more she soon learns how little she really matters to the only person that matters to her.
Two years later, and a year into a new relationship with a kind, loving boyfriend, she is slowly rebuilding the damaged friendships but still craving the man who almost destroyed her, and it seems that even after all this time this unhealthy obsession might destroy it all once again.
Sarah is a really interesting and well drawn character, often unlikeable in her selfishness, but all the more believable because of it. I particularly liked the depiction of her relationship with her father who was widowed when Sarah was just ten years old, and lost himself in a bottle just when she needed him most. I think anyone who has lost their heart ( and their senses) to someone they should not have, will find something that resonates with them in this book.
I really loved the ending of the book, and thought it was perfect for both the character and the story being told.
I received a review copy from the publisher via NetGalley but this did not influence my opinion.