Connie Palmen’s novel Your Story, My Story is an amazing book told in the voice of Mr. Hughes portraying the relationship between Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes. At times you forget this is a work of fiction.

For fans of the poet could be a true treat to this inside of churning of Hughes. The story is fascinating, captivating, moving, and at times hard to read. Theirs is a sad and tragic story.

Thank you #netgalley for an advanced copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Beautifully written and almost painfully tragic to read, this book is both unusual and fabulous.
4 star worthy and a definite recommendation.

A fictionalized telling of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes meeting and relationship that read like a bare-bones biography. Not my favorite.

This book was great! It was so easy to lose yourself in the story, and kept you turning pages to see what happened next! Will definitely be recommending!

This one did not connect with me. It sounded good on paper, the story of the marriage of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath, from the perspective of Hughes. I'm not familiar with Hughes except for his name, and I'm not familiar with their relationship at all. For someone who comes to this story with not even limited knowledge, it falls flat.

The prose itself is heavy handed, with metaphors stuffed in every conceivable crack where some space might have been more effective. Although, this is from Hughes' perspective and in his imagined voice, which as a poet, might be accurate. I am not a fan of poetry, so perhaps I wouldn't have enjoyed that anyway. But maybe toning it down and making it a little more accessible for non-poetry fan would have gone a long way on this one.

The way Hughes refers to Plath through the story is infuriating. Again, not sure if this is intentional, but he only uses her name twice, once in the beginning and once at the end. For most of the book, he refers to her as "my bride," to an extend that makes it hard to read. The author uses the phrase "my bride" 116 times (116!) throughout the book, sometimes multiple times in a single paragraph, and that's not counting instances like " my fatherless bride," "my defeated bride," "my tormented bride," etc. The way he speaks of her, and doesn't use her name, really makes her very one-dimensional, placing all focus on himself. Again, maybe that was the intention. But it really made me not care about either one of them.

One more comment: in the afterword, the author mentions that their son "committed suicide." This is not a term that is used in the medical community anymore, or other places either, as it implies criminality and adds to the stigma place on mental illness. It's also used twice in the book, but that would be accurate, as that would have been the term when Ted Hughes was alive.