I'm finding it difficult to do justice to this story that evoked so many emotions, sometimes from one extreme to another. I was sad and angry among moments of joy and there were times when I laughed out loud. The story a man struggling in a society that doesn't accept homosexuality, living with the odd people who adopted him at three days old, who said he'd never be an Avery . How is it possible for him to have a capacity for love, for caring when he experiences no love or comfort or caring in t...

Few authors can slay me emotionally while simultaneously making me think, the way that John Boyne does. His book The Absolutist (see my original review), is one of my favorite books of all time, and also made my list of the best books I read in 2012. Five years later, I still can't get that book out of my mind or my heart.While not all of Boyne's books have caught my interest, his latest, The Heart's Invisible Furies , utterly knocked me out. I read the entire book in one day (thanks to t...

4.5* rounded up. I subtracted half a star because I had to suspend disbelief with all the coincidences that take place in the novel. No way would they be possible in real life.Yes, yes, yes. I finally found a novel that everybody raves about that I also loved. The Heart’s Invisible Furies made me feel everything, I laughed, I was sad, I was hopeful and then disappointed, I was enraged by the people’s mentalities and I even wanted to punch a couple of the characters in the face, even the main cha...

I learned a lot about Ireland – and the Irish – while reading this book. I learned that the priests are all perverts and sadistic controllers; their parishioners do their best to follow the example of the priests; the people are ignorant (and thus use myriad swear words instead of using real words); the men are either homosexual or they want to be, and if they aren’t either of those, they are still completely obsessed with sex with as many partners as possible, as are the other men. In fact, I l...

Update: If by some crazy reason you have missed this book....its a $1.99 kindle special today. I actually have a phone call to make to make sure a friend buys it today. Not a book to hesitate buying it at this price if you’ve not taken your turn reading it yet. A PHENOMENAL READ!!!!I finished this seconds ago.... THE BEST NOVEL of 2017......It's not only a FAVORITE-FAVORITE....It makes my top 10 BEST BOOKS in at least the last 5 or 6 years!!!! PHENOMENAL- long - lush perfectly escapist read!!!!I...

Maybe there were no villains in my mother’s story at all. Just men and women, trying to do their best by each other. And failing. This book. THIS BOOK. I cannot remember the last time I became so thoroughly immersed in a story, fell so deeply in love with the characters, and had my heart so fully ripped out. The Heart's Invisible Furies is a masterpiece. Most people will know Boyne from his hard-hitting children's book The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, but this book is something else entirely.I

UPDATE: In Audible US sale today 12/26/18The first paragraph of the book is what grabbed me: Long before we discovered that he had fathered two children by two different women, one in Drimoleague and one in Clonakilty, Father James Monroe stood on the altar of the Church of Our Lady, Star of the Sea, in the parish of Goleen, West Cork, and denounced my mother as a whore. Pretty powerful stuff, that. Little Cyril is telling the story as a babe not even born yet and the story he told, whew. I w...

So it's my last review of 2017, and my year in books has ended pretty much as it began with an excellent 5 star read. John Boyne is a truly gifted writer and 'The Heart's Invisible Furies' is simply mesmerising.Cyril Avery was born out of wedlock to 16 year old Catherine Coggins. Because of this, Catherine is banished from the small Irish Community where she's lived all her life. This is 1940's Ireland where Catholic priests very much ruled their communities. Publicly denounced as a whore by the...

Well, I'm definitely in the minority with this one. With an overall average rating of 4.49, based on thousands of reviews, I had expected this book to be a sure thing for me. It just goes to show you that it doesn't always work out that way. That being said, I can definitely see the appeal of this story for a lot of readers. This book addresses many important topics and tackles some controversial subject matter. It covers a period of time that spans decades, from the 1940's to present-day, lendi...

Long before we discovered that he had fathered two children by two different women, one in Drimoleague and one in Clonakilty, Father James Monroe stood on the altar of the Church of Our Lady, Star of the Sea, in the parish of Goleen, West Cork, and denounced my mother as a whore. I imagine I must have been under some sort of a curse for the last sixteen years or so. How else to explain that I just finished reading my first John Boyne novel. Must be the luck of the Irish, well the Irish-Ameri

The Catholic Church has an unpardonable and deplorable history mired in horrors such as support for fascist regimes in Spain, Germany, Italy, its oppositon to liberation theology whilst buttressing the power of the tyrannical dictators of South and Central America and its brutal history in Ireland. John Boyne embodies the heartbreaking history of Ireland and the Catholic Church in the post war years from 1945 to 2015 through the ordinary life and times of Cyril Avery. It is ambitious, moving, un...

let us all take a brief moment of silence and remember the old me, the person i was before i read this book; because by the end of the story, i became someone new and improved.i knew this was going to be a 5 star read within the first couple of chapters, but the absolute magnitude of this story is truly astonishing. and im finding it difficult to adequately describe the raw sincerity and intense emotional pull of this book. i have never used the word ‘unputdownable’ before in a review, but maybe...

5 BILLION STARS “We’re none of us normal. Not in this f*cking country.” I don’t have the words to do this book justice, so all I will say is that I loved everything about this book: the characters, the plot, the sentences. Every moment, every word, every second of reading. It's perfection!

"Why should we take advice on sex from the pope? If he knows anything about it, he shouldn't." -George Bernard ShawAt the outset, author John Boyne sets the scene that will lay the foundation for this bittersweet, decade-traversing novel: sixteen-year-old Catherine Goggan is with child in a god-fearing, godforsaken part of rural Ireland. But this is Ireland in 1945, when blind prejudice is as ubiquitous as clover in the meadows. And, because of her supposedly egregious sin, the town's misogyn

When I first started reading this I had no idea of how much I would end up loving this book. Felt that way for the first 100 pages or so, not that I wasn't liking it but the beginning sometimes seemed a by muddled, couldn't figure out where it was going. It starts in the forties, in an Ireland where Catholic priests held way too much power over the lives of their parishioners. A young woman, barely sixteen and pregnant is literally drummed out of the church, after refusing to name the father of

See this review @ https://readrantrockandroll.com/2017/...I picked this up on Netgalley as soon as I saw it and I was luckily approved. I read The Boy in the Striped Pajamas years ago with my oldest son and couldn’t wait to read this after I read a few reviews on Goodreads from some close friends. The book wasn’t what I expected and due to the myriad of feelings I have about it, I’ve been struggling to write a review on it for a few weeks now. There might be spoilers here.The story begins with a...

4.5 stars"Long before we discovered that he had fathered two children by two different women, one in Drimoleague and one in Clonakilty, Father James Monroe stood on the altar of the Church of Our Lady, Star of the Sea, in the parish of Goleen, West Cork, and denounced my mother as a whore."Catherine Goggin, age sixteen, had the misfortune of finding herself unwed and pregnant in a time and place wholly unforgiving of her condition – the time being the mid-1940s, and the place Ireland, a country