Book Review: Love Objects by Emily Maguire
Nic is a forty-three-year-old trivia buff, amateur nail artist and fairy godmother to the neighbourhood’s stray cats. She’s also the owner of a decade’s worth of daily newspapers, enough clothes and shoes to fill Big W three times over and a pen collection which, if laid end-to-end, would probably circle her house twice.
The person she’s closest to in the world is her beloved niece Lena, who she meets for lunch every Sunday. One day Nic fails to show up. When Lena travels to her aunt’s house to see if Nic’s all right, she gets the shock of her life, and sets in train a series of events that will prove cataclysmic for them both.
By the acclaimed author of An Isolated Incident, Love Objects is a clear-eyed, heart-wrenching and deeply compassionate novel about love and family, betrayal and forgiveness, and the things we do to fill our empty spaces.
Released November 2022
My Thoughts:After loving her latest, Rapture, I pulled this one off my shelf, keen for some more words from Emily Maguire. I ended up doing a hybrid read, listening to the audio in the car, and then reading the book in between listening sessions. This way of reading is fast becoming a favourite of mine.
Love Objects is a deeply complex story of family love, inherited trauma, and hoarding. This is the second novel I’ve read that explores the complexities of hoarding and the difficulties in addressing it. I found this novel to be both sensitive and confronting. Sometimes, I could understand Nic’s hoarding of treasured memorabilia. Other times, I was stunned by her inability to see what the problem was as she collected random junk, cramming it into her house like a bower bird building a nest out of rubbish.
Told from three perspectives, Nic, along with her neice Lena and her nephew Will, the story gives a balanced portrayal of a family in crisis. Class – yes, we don’t live in a classless society here in Australia – underpins much of the story and raises some significantly thought-provoking threads.
I enjoyed this novel, and while at times it pierced my comfort zone, I relished that for its intelligent exploration of a serious mental health issue and its engaging narrative.
Belated thanks to Allen and Unwin for the review copy.
