Painted Words: Episode 2 - Love Stories In This Town

I found this book by Amanda Eyre Ward to be rather…outrageous; and not in the funny or exciting sense of the word. It is basically a collection of various love stories of people facing various difficulties. I must admit, upon reading the summary of the book in the library, I assumed that this was to be similar to Nicholas Sparks’ The Lucky One where there are a few people and their stories slowly come together into one. Instead, Ward’s book is about many different couples.


The writing style of the book was done in a fresh (new?) way that I do not recall having ever seen before. This was really the only thing that drew me to the book after realizing what it was going to be. I kept trying to understand the writing style. It is intriguing, yet eludes me at the same time.

The story content was surprising to me. I must say that it dealt with many situations that I myself have never dealt with, nor do I desire to. These stories baffled me to a certain extent, and I found myself wondering if people truly are this stupid and pathetic in some of these cases. Yet, I cannot deny that these exact same situations have happened in the lives of others around me, including those I know. I suppose I have more empathy with my friends who face such marital problems because they seem to have a true and honest reason to feel as they do. However, in this book, the characters are fake, and well… my review speaks for itself.  In other words, my friends' usually have an actual honest-to-goodness reason to feel the way(s) they do, yet they still try to control their lives in order to go about fixing what is wrong.  In this book, the people didn't really seem to work at the problem and instead seemed to succumb to it.

I believe the writer to be a very good one, though I would be more impressed by a full novel than this book.