The Hypnotist’s Love Story by Liane Moriarty
Liane Moriarty is one of those authors I turn to when I just want an enjoyable story, because her novels are consistently good. This is unlike her other novels in that it’s not exclusively about rich Australian housewives, though they’re all Australian and some of them have been housewives.
As with all her novels, the characters are rather introspective and the story is about their inner lives as much as it is about the external events of their lives. Ellen takes herself very seriously, but because you can be there listening to her thoughts as she overthinks things and chides herself for taking herself too seriously, you kind of sympathize with her. Saskia is a stalker, but you also kind of empathize with her. At least, I did. Moriarty is very good at making believable women, and any child who appears in her novels is a unique and believable human being. Her men are usually not point of view characters, and in this one, we don’t hear Patrick’s point of view until very late in the book and even then it’s second-hand.
There’s a plot twist that comes up at about the 60% mark that felt plausible, though its resolution seemed a little too pat. That her aggressor would decide to unjustly attack her? Believable. That she would miss out on her chance to give her comments to the journalist because of the bad timing of the event the night of the dust storm? Great plotting. That the first client she tells about it happens to have the exact set of skills to solve the issue? A little too pat.
But this is one of those things where the worst trait is also the best trait. This book’s plotlines and character arcs are tidy. You could argue they’re a little too tidy (Saskia’s friend happens to get reacquainted just when she ends up in the hospital, the one guy she happens to see at the beach happens to be friends of her new neighbors) but there are no cliffhangers or annoying loose ends to make me hurl the book at the wall. (That’s figurative, as this was an audiobook.) Almost everyone gets a happy ending, and those whose endings are not happy are at least believable and satisfying.
Not all books have a theme, but this one definitely did. All of the characters deal with how their past relationships affect their present ones. Ellen thinks about John, a guy she dated who was terrible for her. Patrick thinks about Colleen, his beautiful first wife who died tragically young. Saskia can’t think about anyone but Patrick, which is why she has no life. Even Ellen’s mother is still haunted by the fondness she had for Ellen’s father. Patrick has a great speech at the end about love, and about how no love is the same even for the same person in the same day. This is probably a good book for a book club. I’m sure everyone has something to say about how even bad relationships had something good in them, and about how love takes on all shapes and sizes.
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