Adelaide

LoveReading Says

The unbearable pain of unrequited love, grief, and reaching a rock-bottom breaking-point — Genevieve Wheeler’s Adelaide debut is an emotional rollercoaster of a read that boasts crisply commanding storytelling.

From the outset, you feel confident you’re in the hands of a fine writer. An openhearted writer who has a wily knack for putting you right into the mind of its troubled protagonist — a 26-year-old woman whose heart has been broken over and over, sending her to the precipice.

The narrative moves back and forth in time, so we first meet American ex-pat Adelaide when she’s hit rock bottom and takes herself to a London hospital. The arresting opening line — “The funny thing about hitting rock bottom is that you never quite know once you’ve reached it” — is swiftly followed by Adelaide remarking, “This has to be it, right?”

And then comes the lead-up to this tipping point — Adelaide’s relationship with Rory, a “Disney prince” of a man she randomly approached some years ago, and then, by coincidence, re-encountered. While alarm bells clang early on, Adelaide can’t stop thinking he’s the one, until everything falls away.

The evocation of Adelaide’s vulnerability and dogged belief that he is her Disney prince is incredibly poignant. For a moment, she thinks “Perhaps he wasn’t a prince after all…Perhaps he was yet another dragon she needed to slay”, but she still can’t extricate herself.

With notes of hope, such as the soul-reviving possibility of new love hinting that terrible experiences don’t have to condemn you to a lifetime of the same, Adelaide is an exemplary example of honest emotion-driven fiction.

Joanne Owen

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