Book review: The last letter from your lover

Last Letter from Your Lover by Jojo Moyes


My rating: 2 of 5 stars


The good:










The cover is a collage of letter envelopes held together with a ribbon. It's a beautiful nostolgic cover, it reminds me of bundles of letters I used to find in my grandmother's kitchen drawers.










The concept of the book is really what drew me in: the lost art of letter writing. There's just something so much more romantic, heartfelt, sentimental and exciting to receiving a letter. It's the fact that someone has taken pen to paper and taken the time to sit down and write their thoughts and feelings down without the editing tool of the delete button, put it in an envelope, licked a stamp and popped it into the postbox. Having a tangible collection of evidence of a persons thoughts and feelings is intriguing to me. It intrigues me that people could not see each other for spaces of time and maintain this beautiful connected romance through letter.




I liked the idea that a character set in today's time of fast paced technology would find heartfelt love letters from a bygone era and examine what was missing from her own relationship.




The bad:










While the concept of the story was delightful, I found it jumped around a bit too much, it starts with Ellie who finds these love letters then jumps back in time to Jennifer who is having an affair with a man who is unarticulate in person but is so elequent in his letters. We go from Jennifer recovering from an accident back to her meeting her lover for the first time, jump forward again to her struggling with her memory loss then having a screaming match with her husband who knew all about the affair and then somehow it's four years later and she has a child. It's never really explained when she became pregnant, how old the child is or if their's any possibility it's not her husband. For me it was a bit too stereotypical that her husband the rich, powerful business man who gave her everything she could possibly want and who clearly adored her was portrayed as a cold villian and her lover was the man who was coming to save her from it all. While it was portrayed that she was miserable in her marriage, to me it seemed as if she was merely bored.




Overall it was alright but it wasn't the riveting explorations of the lost art of letter writing I thought it would be.




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