Louise O'Neill is an extremely intelligent and perceptive author and once again, her writing absolutely soars. I tore through this book and rate it highly although for me there would have been more nuance in making Sarah less categorically unpleasant and a bit less complicit in her degradation. I suppose it underscores her lack of self-esteem and capacity for self-delusion but for me the portrayal diluted the satisfaction and the feminist message a bit.

Heartbreakingly sad read but has made it to my list of best books so far this year. A must read for any fan of this genre, not to be missed!

I am sorry to say that I didn't like this book. I normally enjoy O Neills books and will continue to read. I didn't think this book was anything like Marian Keyes style of writing.

An interesting and raw character study of a self-destructive mid twenties girl called Sarah. I really enjoyed reading how Sarah's character unravelled, and the impact it had on her life and everyone around. For most of the book I wanted to shake her and scream 'cop the f*** on'. She really is a character I loved to hate.
I honestly however don't go along with the opinions that this is a portrayal of gender roles and men's power play etc. This story was clearly written with the male character disclosing fully his intentions and Sarah just not being accepting of these.
It did make me look at the manipulation of a person's weaknesses and insecurities by those they give power to and highlighted a huge need for people to increase their self awareness.
A thought provoking 3.5/5

I thought I'd like this novel because of the title and because it was recommended for fans of Marian Keyes. I was disappointed.

The novel centres around Sarah, a young woman who has many unpleasant traits such as self pity, jealousy, selfishness, the ability to hurt others and a lazy attitude towards life. All that darkness without a glimmer of light or a redeeming quality is hard to empathise with. I did try but the novel unraveled slowly and I couldn't invest in Sarah's journey.

She was involved in an abusive relationship and still hankers after the man years later. The novel seems to be about her trying to turn her life around. She doesn't try very hard and she hurts a lot of people and I ended up disinterested in what happened to her.

We discover that Sarah is a lousy teacher and colleague and unprofessional. She went to art college but doesn't put the hours of effort in to try to become a successful painter. so teaching is for a pay packet not a vocation. She has a loving partner but is cruel to him and so rude to his mother who is trying to help her. Her relationship with her father is poor because she can't move on from how he was when she was a child. She has good friends who she treats badly.

I didn't enjoy the book. The most perplexing and irritating thing was the comparison with Marian Keyes. Yes, she also writes about flawed Irish characters but there the sililarity ends. Marian Keyes gives her characters heart and uses light and shade to draw the reader into her stories.

Every time you almost start to like the main character, the author reminds you that she's a shitty person. It's fantastic writing, because despite this, I still want to keep reading. The guy - Matthew - is completely repulsive though, but you can understand why Sarah would like him, if only in part because she's the awful person that she is.

This is a criminally difficult book to read, in two ways. Firstly, the normal way, in that it's very slow and not a lot happens. Secondly and more importantly though, it's hard to read because it sheds an intense light on being a woman. Being in desperate need of validation and love. Being a shitty person sometimes.

I cried. I highlighted a lot of passages that I immediately felt in my bones.

I feel like this an important book for a lot of women.

My favorite thing about this book is that the main character, Sarah is not supposed to be likable. She is deeply flawed and because of that, she is not an immediately relatable character or perceived as a nice person. This is not a book that you read because you want to feel happy for the characters. As Sarah grows and is forced to face herself and her choices so is the reader. Throughout the book one of the themes that are most talked about are unhealthy relationships and how many different aspects there are to them. I particularly liked that subject because for Sarah at least, getting away from such a relationship was also a way for her to grow and start preparing herself to be the person that she has the potential to be.

I could not gel with this book. I thought going into this i would love this as O'Neill also wrote Only Ever Yours but this book was not for me. The beginning shows Sarah in a bad light and I really did not care about her. As the story progresses, I should have cared more but I just did not. This was not for me but I'll try something from Louise O'Neill again

‘We all have regrets. That’s part of being an adult.’

To be quite frank I was disappointed by this book. I read Louise’s previous book “Asking For It” and despite the tough topics it covered and the not so likeable lead character, I enjoyed the message it portrayed.
With “Almost Love” however I just felt frustrated by Sarah and her horrible attitude. She was selfish, self-absorbed and rude. I felt like she had no redeeming qualities and this made it very difficult to feel any sympathy for her.
I can understand the need to write a character who is realistic rather than likeable, and Louise does that very well, but for me I need to connect with a character to really be invested in their story and that just didn’t happen with Sarah.

Some of the other characters were very likeable though. I particularly liked Fionn. He seemed like such a genuinely nice guy who loved Sarah and would have done anything for her.

On a more positive note there were things I did enjoy about this book. The writing style was descriptive and the situations were true to life. Louise once again portrays a number of serious messages about toxic relationships, self-worth and feminism.
This book isn’t as hard hitting as “Asking For It” but it does raise the questions of “am I good enough” and “am I worthy of love” that lots of women, in particular, will relate to.

Louise O’Neill doesn’t shy away from telling it like it is and although it’s not always comfortable to read, it is thought provoking.

3 ⭐️⭐️⭐️

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher (Quercus Books) for providing a copy. All opinions are my own and provided willingly.

Phenomenal. I read it in as close to one sitting as I could manage. A properly compulsive read that will touch very close to home for a lot of readers. Sarah is a fantastic and frustrating protagonist (in a good way!) and we follow her making decisions that are likely to be fully recognisable. O'Neill has written a book that is honest and truly necessary.

I am sorry but I could not get into this book at all. I did not like any of the characters especially Sarah. I kept reading but could not get any interest in or empathy with the characters.

Thank you to Netgalley for my copy.

A story about growing up and making mistakes along the way. No one is perfect and the way we view each other is impermanent too. Reminded me of Sally Rooney’s ‘Conversations with Friends’ and ‘Can’t Cope, Won’t Cope’. Compelling enough to finish but I found the same problems with Sarah that her friends did: she’s the kind of character who’s so wrapped up in herself that everyone else is an afterthought. I wasn’t sorry to say goodbye to her.

Another hard hitting and thought provoking story. You can understand the main character's reason behind the cruel comments being said and she cant hold it in which loses her some of her closest friends. She tries to stay near Dublin with her boyfriend and be with her college friends but with failed relationship and failed relationship, she goes home to her dad who is still grieving for his wife and wants his daughter back home even though she's 27.

An easy quick read. I throughly enjoyed this book which is probably why I flew through it.
I was hooked from the very first page.
Yes it’s about I’ve however to me it offers so much more than that.
Recommended read.
Thank you to both NetGalley and Quercus Books for my eARC in exchange for my honest unbiased review

When I read the synopsis for ‘Almost Love’, I mistook it for YA, partly because ‘Asking for It’ (which I read last year) was, and also because I wrongly assumed it was about a teen in an abusive relationship with a much older man. But this was definitely an adult book, about a twenty-something schoolteacher (Sarah) in a psychologically damaging affair with the father of one of her students (Matthew). Not my usual read, so at first I wasn’t sure how I felt about reading this, but ‘Almost Love’ surprised me in that it was just as brutally honest, timely, and emotional as ‘Asking for It’.

A quick, easy read, utilising one, third person POV, with the NOW and THEN format replacing chapters. Content wise, the abuse is psychological, but also physical in the form of rough/rape sex. I wouldn’t call it graphic, nor does it go into great detail, but it isn’t mild either, instead falls somewhere in between.

Sarah was a toxic person – a damaged soul long before she encountered Matthew, the majority of her issues stemming from childhood trauma. And, I would never make light of what she endured as a child (it was awful what she went through), but she was a grown woman in this book, who had a lot of good (and support) in her life – more than most, and she doesn’t appreciate any of it. Sarah is selfish, she’s whiny, and treats her family and friends like crap, expecting them to be at her beck and call, but doesn’t do the same for them in return. I’m guessing this was the point, that when a person feels this low, they cannot see what they have, and continuously make poor choices. And, I found it all really interesting, and I relished analysing Sarah, but if unlikeable protagonists, who never learn from their mistakes, depress you, then I’d steer clear of this one.

The other thing I found really intriguing was that in the present storyline, Sarah was psychologically abusive towards her live-in boyfriend, Oisin (not a spoiler – made clear from the onset), in fact in some ways she treated him worse than Matthew treated her. Also, I liked how this book showed how Sarah’s poisonous association with Matthew, impacted her friendships, and affected those closest to her. Yet more reasons why this was such a compelling novel.

This was my second read by Lousie O’Neill that I rated highly, so if she writes more in this vein, whether it’s adult or YA, I’ll be reading.

I’d like to thank Netgalley, Quercus Books, and Louise O’Neill for the e-ARC.

UK Publication Date: 7th March, 2019

Review posted to Amazon, Goodreads and Instagram.

Sarah is an inspiring artist turned art teacher, left feeling jaded as artists she surrounds herself become successful as she struggles to create. As she becomes increasingly more self-destructive she enters into a relationship with an older man that will never love her the way she craves to be loved.

The premise of this book really intrigued me. Something that was definitely up my street but unfortunately no matter how hard I tried, I could not get into this.

I found the characters so deeply unlikeable that I didn’t care what happened to them. I don’t expect to be in love with every character but I do wish for them to have at least one redeemable quality so that I can be somewhat invested in them.

I found the first couple of chapters somewhat hard to read through. O’Neill introduces so many characters in the first 20-30 pages with little details besides names that I found it hard to keep track of who was who An day often found myself flicking back pages to re-read and make sure I knew what was happening. Maybe if I had sat and read in one sitting I wouldn’t have had this issue but it seemed unnecessary to introduce task many characters that early on.

This book seems to be very polarising with people either raving about it or left feeling disappointed. I’m afraid I fall into the later category.

An e-copy of this book was gifted to me by the publisher, Quercus Books, via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

I received a free copy of this book via NetGalley in return for an honest review.

I unexpectedly loved Louise O'Neill's Only Ever Yours, so I was curious to see how she writes in a contemporary setting.

This is not a love story. It is a psychological deconstruction of obsessive love. Sarah, the refreshingly unlikable female protagonist, has every self-obsessed naive character flaw I think every woman can recognise in themselves. Switching between 'Now' and 'Then' and the two men Sarah loves charts a novel through the mundane despair of a single-sided relationship.

"Sarah couldn't imagine what that felt like, to see a man as a source of love rather than needing him to take care of her."

O'Neill is a deft, sharp writer, able to pinprick every emotional tide and flow but also convey the Irish dialogue and dialect without descending into parody. I devoured this in one sitting, and I look forward to reading more of her honest, feminist understanding of young women.

Honestly I just didn’t like this story, the main character Sarah was just so unlikeable. It made it really hard to feel any empathy towards her.

Things are not going too well between Sarah and her partner. Is it just because her job as a teacher exhausts and frustrates her? She is an artist, but has never been good enough to really succeed with her paintings, not like her mother-in-law to be or her best friend. When she flees their home one afternoon, she by coincidence meets Matthew and all comes up again. The man she loved like never before, the man she would have given up everything for – the man she has given up everything for and destroyed so much. But he is still Matthew and there is something in her that makes the old feeling, she thought she had overcome, show up again.

After reading the blurb, I expected a story with an unhealthy love addiction and intense feelings on the part of the female protagonist. I was quite sure to feel compassion for her obsessive love and what it makes with her, yet, I mainly hated Sarah, even more than Matthew, which made it a bit difficult to really enjoy the novel.

So, why didn’t I feel pity for her? First of all, she is incredibly arrogant. When still young, her best friend from university gets the big chance of an exhibition, but instead of being happy for him, she envies him and is convinced that it should have been her. Second, her father obviously is quite lonely in their remote village and he always tries not to put her under pressure and to tolerate her awful behaviour, but she treats him like an old imbecile. Yes, he might not have been the perfect dad when her mother died – yet, he also lost his beloved wife and needed time for himself and his grief. Her school friends are just places she can dump her personal dramas, she doesn’t care about their problems and feelings and even doesn’t realise when she spoils her former best friend’s wedding. The current relationship is marked by her evil behaviour towards her boyfriend. No, he cannot do anything right, she only snaps at him and looks down on him. All of this is not necessarily linked to her obsessive love, not, she is just a very mean person.

When it comes to her flashbacks and memories of the time with Matthew, well, it is the classic constellation: a successful man in the middle of his life meets the naive girl who falls for him and somehow she succumbs to the illusion that he might also fall in love with her. Her whole behaviour – bombarding him with text messages, dropping everything when he calls, accepting all his wishes in their shabby hotel room, being subservient in any imaginable way – well, that’s something that might happen, but over months without understanding what is going on? That she is never at his side in public, but hidden in a hotel room where he doesn’t even have the time for a proper conversation with her? At least, she can serve as a cautionary tale.

I am not sure if I find Sarah’s character authentic and thus could really believe the story. Nevertheless, it captivated me somehow and I almost read it in just one sitting which definitely speaks for Louise O’Neill.

I've read some of Louise O'Neill's YA novels and really enjoyed them, but this was something very different. Almost Love explores the destructive side of relationships and the way that unresolved issues can linger and fester, even in seemingly healthy partnerships. The book uses two timelines to tell Sarah's story - one, 'Then', showing the toxic relationship she had with an older man when she was in her early twenties, and the other, 'Now', showing how that relationship, long over, continues to impact on Sarah's life.

Sarah is an unflinchingly real character, and as such is often unlikeable. She can be selfish and unkind, thoughtless and reckless. But that is where the power of this novel lies. In the gritty reality of Sarah, you see the undeniable truth of the long lasting effect that a manipulative and abusive relationship can have.