If there's something that attracts me to a book at first go, after the cover then it has to be the content of the book. When I read a few reviews of Courtenay Merchant’s For the Love of Harry and I saw it is about a father and a son, how could I have missed reading it? Reading it, though, proved to be a very good decision of my life.
About the book- We have all done things we regret, but what if we are responsible for something, we know we could never recover from? How do we and those whose lives that are so brutally invaded, survive such needless and senseless change? For some it is impossible, for others, they just have to live. John Shaw is a single father with a secret, a secret steeped in guilt, which he’s forced to remember every day. Gary Cole is a young successful IT engineer from humble beginnings with the opportunity of a lifetime; one selfish mistake could cost him everything. Having already suffered so much, John loses the only thing that keeps him in touch with reality and life itself. No matter how hard his friends try, John struggles to find a way back.
Gary Cole must start again, but how do you come back from this, how do you live with yourself? Every ounce of his fatherly devotion becomes the unending source of John’s desire for revenge, as he grips obsessively to an irrational memory that he carries with him tirelessly in the physical world. John knows full well his desperate need for revenge could end his very existence. Will he see it through to the end? Can he see it through to the end? Or will a chance encounter help John find a way to put the past behind him? As John and Gary’s worlds collide, can forgiveness ever be an option?
Gary Cole must start again, but how do you come back from this, how do you live with yourself? Every ounce of his fatherly devotion becomes the unending source of John’s desire for revenge, as he grips obsessively to an irrational memory that he carries with him tirelessly in the physical world. John knows full well his desperate need for revenge could end his very existence. Will he see it through to the end? Can he see it through to the end? Or will a chance encounter help John find a way to put the past behind him? As John and Gary’s worlds collide, can forgiveness ever be an option?
Fathers are the most precious thing that can happen to any child and I can say this in written. Mothers surely give birth but fathers keep both the mother and the child going. Every father can do anything and everything for his children. John Shaw was no different. When I started reading the book there were too many characters to process and it took me a bit of a time to hold on to the character names and getting a complete picture of the situation.
But when I did, there was no looking back. The writing style of the author is such that the incidents of the book remain etched on your mind for a very long time. You can visualize every single thing in the book. The narration was on point and that made this 190 pages book a very smooth read for me. Even now if I close my eyes, I can visualize the scenes from the book.
That set aside, I loved how this book was conceived. The whole idea of the book. How far can a father go when it comes to his child? The topic is a very close to my heart topic and I could feel every ounce of pain felt by John. Having said that, Gary Cole was a character I sympathized with. Ho, after all, can you live your life with the torment of doing something irreversible?
I love the characters of the book and my favorite was Richard (for reasons you would know when you read the book). If I have to speak of the cons of it, I feel that the beginning could've been a bit stronger and the end was a bit predictable for me. For all those moments where I had a lump in my throat while reading this book, looking forward to more from the author, I would give this one 4 out of 5.
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