Only Love Can Break Your Heart by Ed Tarkington

5 Stars

 

“We all get what’s coming to us, but we don’t all get what we deserve.”

Only Love Can Break Your Heart is the 195th book I’ve read this year. Out of those 195, I’ve only handed out a handful of 5 Star ratings. I don’t know what it was about this novel that sucked me in, but boy did it and I couldn’t put it down. This is one of those books that’s about nothing – but is also about everything. It’s the story of Rocky’s life. How he grew up with a brother he idolized who was 8 years his senior and how everything fell apart one night when said brother left him for dead. It’s about Rocky’s coming of age with a significantly older neighbor and how a life of privilege can be swiftly taken away. It’s about family and growing up and sins of the past and making amends in the present. It’s just . . . . JUST.

This little book pinged my radar for one reason alone – the cover looks remarkably similar to The Good Luck of Right Now which I read and enjoyed last year. They say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, and imitating this cover might end up selling a few books too. Tarkington also might be the fella to give Matthew Quick a run for his money when it comes to writing a can’t-put-downable type of story with an ensemble cast of dysfunctional characters. And best of all, Only Love Can Break Your Heart provided a soundtrack that took me back to my own childhood and the sounds that would spin from the turntable of the relative I idolized . . .



“For me, a vinyl record will always be a sacred object; the practice of sliding the disc from its musty sleeve and setting it onto the turntable and hearing the warm crack of the needle finding its groove, a sacrament – my Holy Communion.”

(Hot damn but the fella can write, right?)

“Hey hey, my my. Rock and roll will never die . . .”



ARC provided by NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. 

Thank you, NetGalley!