Roxanne reviews True Love: A Novel by Sarah Gerard
Since I’ve enjoyed Sarah Gerard’s previous literary endeavors, Sunshine State (essays) and Binary Star (novel), despite mediocre reviews, I dove into her most recent True Love: A Novel. And I’m so glad I did.
Sure, Sarah may have ventured down a similar dysfunctional woman in relationships trope, however, this narrative possesses a fresh and super contemporary perspective. One of the many reasons I miss teaching is staying in touch with new trends and lingo and True Love: A Novel certainly helped me feel hip again.
The main character, Nina, is the twenty or thirty something narrator with multiple male interests and in order to find her vocational and relationship ‘truth’, chooses directions of roads less traveled. With an at times heartbreaking Floridian back story, (of which Sarah is from and we were lucky to have Sarah as a BookStoreOne guest when she was the New College Writer in Residence) Nina can appear to be shallow. Yet as you read, you’ll discover a woman just as human as the rest of us, trying to figure out how to get through this maze called life, looking to see what path to take next to find her ‘cheese’.
Literature is a wonderful distraction because an author takes us places we’ve never been and shows us choices we’ll never dare take. For these reasons, I highly recommend True Love: A Novel.