Review :: I Love You to Death by Natalie Ward

When Ash loses her boyfriend, she is consumed by grief, loneliness and an overwhelming sense of guilt for her role in not only his death, but the deaths of everyone she has ever loved. Refusing to let anyone in for fear of losing them too, she becomes withdrawn, spending her days reliving the nightmares from her past.

Until she meets Luke.

Initially scared by his intensity and interest in her, Ash tries to push him away. But as Luke slowly starts to chip away at the walls she’s built, Ash finds herself doing the one thing she swore she’d never do again — falling in love.

When the familiar feelings Ash had hoped were long buried with her past begin to resurface, she is forced to ask herself if falling in love again is really worth the risk

Title: I Love You to Death
 
Author: Natalie Ward

Publication Date: 27 September 2012

My Rating: 3.5 Stars

Series / Stand Alone: Stand Alone

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My Review

I Love You to Death is probably the strangest book I've ever read. Not to mention the darkest...

I don't actually know how I feel about this book. I'm not sure if it's a 4 star read or a 3.5 star read.

The reason I say this is because it's got good parts... but it's also full of parts that just become to much after a while. It's dark and utterly depressing. The saddest part is that the dark completely out-ways the light and therefore when I reached the end of the book, I didn't do it entering into a happier place, like I guess I'm suppose to. 

Ash is terribly negative... of course with more than enough reason to be... but even when she's happy, it still feels heavy and draining.

I didn't like the idea of jumping back and forth between past and present. That always seems to throw me off the current mood and it's not my favorite type of writing style. That's what happens here... one minute you are reading about a blossoming love developing between Ash and Luke and the next you are taken back to a random moment in Asha's past that's related to the death of a loved one. Therefore you don't really get the opportunity to enjoy the romance because it's suddenly stopped short and you have to enter the dark parts.

I actually began skipping through the chapter breaks eventually when I picked up the pattern of how it works. In every chapter there's a present and then a break with a reflection on the past and then another break, going back to the present and then we head back into the past... it goes on like this throughout the entire book. It would have been better if all the past could have been done from the start and then as the novel moved forward... to focus only on the present. This way one can adsorb the emotions... the way it was written didn't allow much of that.

There's so little dialogue in this book and even then... it's clipped and simple. Majority of the book is written as Asha's internal thoughts and I don't really know if I like that... it was more of a diary writing style... and therefore... I felt removed from the tale.

 

“...when you ran away from me tonight, that felt like dying to me...” 

 

Let's just say that I did enjoy certain parts, but I wasn't a major fan of this book. It was so different to what I've read before and even with all the sad... the book didn't grip me. In the present tense, the book jumps ahead at a huge pace. The book takes place through the span of one year and this shocked me, when I realized this, because I didn't even notice that time was moving along so quickly. 

Although this book does have a HEA, it doesn't feel like it at all. I'm still surrounded by gloom and dark images and that alone doesn't make the book enjoyable. Other than that, it's not half bad. It's different and I don't know what needs to be going through your mind in order to write this type of dark love story... I don't think that if I ever wrote my own book... that I could ever imagine something this dark and deep.