The Hypnotist's Love Story by Liane Moriarty
Review: ★★★ ½
This whole novel gripped me from start to finish. What an intriguing plot: a stalker I could sympathize with? Sensational. I was definitely hooked.
I started off the book really liking Ellen, our hypnotist, and rooting for her and her happy ending. There are two narrators: Ellen (the heroine) and Saskia (Patrick's, stalker—Patrick being Ellen's new beau). Knowing a bit about Moriarty's style from her previous novels, I expected I would come to love Saskia, as well as Ellen, or sympathize with her at least.
But that's not exactly what happened.
I was really surprised by how much I liked Saskia. I will say that by the end of the novel, she was the more sympathetic character, and something down in me just wanted to go hug her and bring her a plate of cookies. The resolution of her story was more moving to me than that of Ellen's.
It was super interesting, because when you read from her view, you were inside an addict's head, only, in stead of drugs or alcohol, there was super creepy stalking. This woman had everyone she's ever called family torn away from her in one fell swoop, and is coping the only way she knows how.
Hypnotism played a pretty large roll, and added a really interesting dynamic as a profession for our heroine. I even was prompted to do some research (high brow google-ing) afterwards.
So here's the thing, as the novel unfolded I found myself more and more annoyed with Ellen, and a bit scared of Patrick on her behalf. For one thing, a superiority complex that hadn't been obvious in the beginning definitely came out towards the end. Yes, I know we all have flaws, and I'm all for relatable characters, but this problem was never addressed, never even really acknowledged.
Don't get me wrong, that would have been fine if it was only a character flaw. Yay! We love characters with baggage. No one likes to read about the perfect angel that walked through life in a cloud of kindness and mercy. We need internal bumps! We need personality obstacles that bring characters down to Earth so we can squish our feet into their shoes and walk around on an adventure, but this superiority complex strongly affected her relationships. In fact, every interaction with almost every character was affected. I would have liked this hashed out!
We know she's not perfect, but do we know that she knows that she's not perfect. That is the question!
I was a bit ticked when everything worked out fine for Ellen—for goodness sakes she was hypnotizing her lover and other people! She was manipulating them without their knowledge! I also thought her views on hypnotism (that her victims, *cough*, I mean clients would still be in control) was a load of crap. At least as far as I could tell from the storyline: She blatantly interferes with people's lives in very intrusive and, honestly, terrifying ways, but this never seems to be a problem or give her adverse results.
I was also sad that I never really became a part of 'team Patrick' until the VERY end. We don't ever get a clear picture of him until then. It was touching to see the difficult feelings she had to work through being in a relationship with a widower, but (since the whole premise was her dealing with a stalker and risking life and limb for this man) I felt a bit short changed. I didn't think she should even be in the relationship until those final chapters.
So to sum that part up: her whole relationship with Patrick was from her perspective and that I thought that Patrick might be psychotic or possibly delusional. That should tell you something about their relationship, or at least Ellen's narration of it. The love between them definitely needed more time and more work since their relationship was semi-central to the plot.
I will admit I didn't enjoy it as much as I thought I was going to because of my own high expectations since immediately before I read Big Little Lies (which I loved so much). I definitely learned from this experience to approach books without brandishing another novel to compare them against.
This was a good novel though! I would reference my first paragraph and point out that this is a story about a HYPNOTIST and a STALKER. Can I get an "omg, I must read it!" or what?
OVERALL THIS BOOK GETS 3.5 STARS. STILL A GOOD READ.