'Souvenir" by Therese Fowler

First of all I want to thank all my fellow, wonderful bloggers for friendly words and for keeping me in your thoughts these past several days. It means a lot to me and reaffirms my decision to even have a blog. I get to know you all through your writings and it is a wonderful feeling. Having a blog also gives me a chance to share my thoughts about books like ‘Souvenir’ by Therese Fowler. What a great book this one is. To give you a short description, the story revolves around Meg Powell and Carson McKay. Through their childhood and teenage years they were best friends moving on to being lovers and true soul mates. But then Meg was faced with a marriage proposal from another man and she made a choice to accept it and put her ‘puppy’ love behind (I write ‘made a choice’ because I believe we always have a choice even though those of you who already read it or will read might not agree with me that Meg had one). We meet Meg and Carson seventeen years later. Meg is stuck in an unhappy marriage but has a daughter whom she loves dearly. Carson is a famous and accomplished musician.
I liked the book because even though it was a quick read, or maybe due to it, the writing was very engaging and the main theme is remembrance of things past and living with the mistakes from the past. I could not reveal the important event in the book because that would spoil it for those who have not read it yet and would like to but I can tell you that it is something that happens to many of us and something that mobilizes us into doing things differently, living our lives in the present but minding our decisions from the past and trying to not make them again.
Some critics say that Ms. Fowler writes with the intensity of Jodi Picoult. I would say that yes her story-telling is intense but also gentle in a way that we are not slammed in the head with rapidly developing events but slowly introduced into the lives and hearts of the characters, giving us time to understand them, their decisions, past and present and to not rush into judgments. This is not to say that I wasn’t moved deeply by the book. I, in fact, wept as if I were Carson or Meg myself. But I am glad that I did because a good crying was something I needed for a long time and this book proved to be once again a therapy.