Member Review

The Key to my Heart is what I would refer to as a ‘cry book’.

We’re first introduced to Natalie and her friends Lucy, Roxanne and Priya as they’re sitting in a nightclub. Priya is very newly married and pregnant while Lucy and Roxanne seem to be determined to fix an uninterested Natalie up with someone in the bar.

Natalie is good-natured but it’s easy to sense that she’s not happy about the proceedings, going along with their plans reluctantly. And this is how she meets Tom.

Able to escape from her friends’ not-so-subtle set-up, Natalie goes home to her quiet run-down countryside home and it’s there we finally get the truth, she’s mourning for her husband. Her friends can’t seem to understand that grief is a slow process for some. Russ, her husband, was young, taken suddenly and that isn’t something that you can just bounce back from. Her friends have good intentions, but right now they’re misguided, Natalie’s not ready.

I love the way that this story introduces us to all the characters who will slowly come to mean a lot. Natalie is struggling, but she is strong, a factor that some can see and others overlook. She has a supportive older sister, Jodie, a great secondary mother figure in Shauna and the man she met briefly in a bar ends up being a really good friend.

So, what makes this book so readable I picked it up at the start of a bank holiday weekend and finished it before I went to bed that night?

The story isn’t predictable. Are there moments when you just know something is going to happen that’s going to have you crying? Absolutely. Could I predict what was going to happen at the end? Not at all. There were a few points where I was sure I could call it, where I wanted something to occur, but it didn’t play out that way at all.

Every single character in this book - from the friends who thought they knew best, to the notebook guy, Joe, whom Natalie spotted several times in her regular cafe - had a role to play in her story. They were her friends, her support network, her cheerleaders and her confidantes.

I loved the moments where serendipity had a role to play - it feels as though it was a character in its own right and is a recurring theme in Louis’ books (if the last one I read is anything to go by). However, none of it is over-used or feels in any way contrived.

This book made me cry, it made me laugh and it made me glad that I picked up Eight Perfect Hours and read that so I knew, without a shadow of a doubt, that Lia Louis’ books tug at the heartstrings and make you feel a lot.