Where Love Lies by Julie Cohen - 5* Review

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When Felicity steps off the train on the way to meet her husband, she is so sure of everything. Where she is heading, what she will eat at the restaurant, the first words her husband will say when she arrives, their life together.

Then she catches a scent of perfume in the air. Forgotten emotions rush to the surface, memories of another man she loved years ago.

As it happens again and again, Felicity beginsto make decisions that no one can understand. What is happening to her? Is she losing a partof herself, or finding one?

How can she truly know where love lies?

Felicity is struggling with her life; her career as a children’s writer/illustrator is in jeopardy as she seems to be suffering from an unyielding writer’s block, and she feels suffocated in her marriage to Quinn. As lovely as he is to her, she feels stifled with the pressure and lack of privacy from his family. She seems to not know where she feels she belongs any more.

She begins to smell a the sweet scent of frangipani that evokes memories from her past – in particular memories of her recently deceased mother. She knows that the scent takes her straight back to Evan, her old love. Her heart tells her to seek him out to see if the feelings she is having about him are real, but her head tells her to stay where she is with a man who loves her. What does she trust more? Is it really fate at work?

I loved Where Love Lies almost as much as I loved Cohen’s Dear Thing, but don’t be deterred by the ‘almost’ – it really is the most wonderful story, beautifully written in a style that Cohen has marked as her own. She is a remarkable writer with the ability to draw the reader into the story with the most engaging plot and characters.

The characters are exceptionally well developed; Felicity is flighty, indecisive, and at times, infuriating with the decisions she makes, but then we understand why and in the third part of the book I felt a real, emotional tie with her and saw her stark vulnerability.

Quinn too was irritatingly suffocating at first and I found myself trying to escape from him too, and as for his mother… but as the book went on he grew on me a lot. In fact by the end the whole family are shown in a completely different light, as you become aware of the secrets they have been hiding under their Stepford exterior.

Fabulous book… highly recommended!