To Liv From the Ruin

by Adrienne Stewart Patton

Adrienne has created her own genre here, so much so that I hardly know how to begin to describe this book. It's an allegorical Christian fantasy, I suppose, with a touch of dystopian. I kept losing myself in the story, falling in love with the characters, but this is a thinking book, and I had to continually pull myself back (dig deeper in?) to  see the bigger picture. I'm still chewing on it.

When Liv Raines was six years old, she imagined within herself a world inhabited by the personified Pieces of her soul. The reader enters this landscape four years later, when Liv suffers an unknown tragedy and the Pieces are left in darkness and chaos. Liv's struggle is told through their story, as they work together to find Liv and bring her back, and to learn what that all means.

All I could think when I finished was how disappointed I felt, how much I didn't like the book overall. I was uncomfortable with the angle Adrienne took on this subject, because it just didn't make sense to me. But, as I said before, it made me think. And the more I thought, the more I understood. On one level, this is a journey of faith for all of these Pieces, and on quite another one, it is a personification of the internal struggle to find ourselves amidst tragedy and the numerous voices clambering within our minds.

4/5 leaves

(Thanks to Adrienne Stewart Patton for giving me a free e-copy of her book in exchange for an honest review!)