Out of Love by Hazel Hayes tells a story that many of us have lived, hopefully just once. It’s not your everyday love story. Hayes takes a more unique approach—chronicling the deconstruction of a relationship in the attempt to figure out when love exited stage left. We’re left to wonder—was this love story always destined to fail? Or were these two individuals just too damaged to grow together past a certain point?
This story starts where the love story ends, and takes you all the way back to when the characters first met. As the story progresses, you gradually come to understand why these two individuals are the way that they are. The main character’s name is also never revealed, allowing you to become fully immersed in the story and feel as though you are the main character. This makes the story hit especially hard, as we’ve all had a Theo in our lives! Right? No? Was it just me? I will say that, much like the young lady in the story, I’ve had many supporting individuals in my life. People that will always be there to cry with me, help pick up the pieces, encourage me to keep going, and deliver the blunt truth when I am unwilling to see it for myself.
This book took me back to my own failed relationship. It made me question when did WE lose the love? The painfully slow demise of a relationship is the worst part of all; you don’t know what to do or where you stand. And I was there! I stuck around because part of me loved that person, and I hated the thought of things changing and us not being us anymore. The other part of me KNEW that it was over, but even though I knew it, I held on to the hope that the bouts of him being distant meant nothing compared to the little bits of affection. Those moments meant the world to me, and I held on to those memories with a clutched fist until he walked out the door.
As this book comes to a close, the ending reveals why the main character stuck around, and why this relationship was always destined to end. In the end, the characters were just not prepared to be in such a committed relationship with each other until they dealt with the demons each of them had. The fact that it’s based in London (with the ending more based in Dublin) had me reliving my own love story on the other side of the world. I would recommend this book to any young woman struggling with her own ending to a love story. Sometimes they don’t work out the way we want them to, or with whom we want them to work out with, but that doesn’t mean we each don’t deserve love.
Maggio Studio 