Review: The Paper Swan by Leylah Attar

My Thoughts

An intense, tempestuous, suspenseful story of love, vengeance and forgiveness. It’s a bold and gripping novel that will take you on a ride.

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My Thoughts

They say it takes 21 days to form a habit.

They lie.

For 21 days she held on.

But on Day 22, she would have given anything for the sweet slumber of death.

Because on Day 22, she realizes that her only way out means certain death for one of the two men she loves.

My Review

This book. It was a torment of emotions. Intense. Gritty. Complicated. Sharp and fluid all at once. It was my first experience reading Leylah Attar and I was immediately struck by her solid, expressive writing. Attar managed to weave a story that raged like a storm. The beginning was frenzied and violent, crashing over me in waves of acute, heart-pounding fear as our protagonist was abducted. Her life clearly at an end.

“Who are the last people you think of before you die?

I squeezed my eyes shut, anticipating the click, the cold, lead-weighted inevitability of death.

Those are the ones you loved the most.“

Then the story morphs into a different kind of storm altogether, past and presents colliding, vengeance and penance dueling, and everything that we think we know twists unexpectedly. All the while, my emotions vacillate from anger to fear, to confusion and acceptance… even hope and something more. Skye Sedgewick has been taken at gunpoint, broken down physically and emotionally, forced to endure horrifying, hopeless circumstances.

“I felt like all the bits that held me together were slowly coming unglued, falling off, piece by piece. I was disappearing, disintegrating like rocks that get eaten by the sea.”

And every time the storm seemed to calm, something would happen that would get me back on edge, making me lose my footing on the story. But through her inescapable circumstances, as Skye gets closer to Damian, her abductor, she is determined to find answers… and more importantly, a window for escape.

Yet of course, their story ebbs and flows, deepening in feeling and intrigue with every flip of the page. Truths revealed change everything as retribution rages as the primary undercurrent.

“You can either choose love or you can choose hate, because where one lives, the other will die.”

Amidst the maelstrom of truths and conflicted emotions, love finds a way and choices must be made for the future of captor and captive.

There’s much I loved about the book… the cultural backdrop of Mexico, the riot of emotions the story stirs up, the flawed and complex characters, and the gripping and fluid writing.

The story is threaded with flashbacks from the past, tender hearted moments, barely bridled desire, love and hate, loss and forgiveness. This is an edgier, intense novel, not necessarily dark, but certainly one laced with fear and marred by violence. And even more than that, it was certainly a draw to experience an epic kind of romance that is far from perfect, far from simple, but close to heaven for two people who have both endured more pain, deceit, and heartbreak than they should have.

“We are sand and rock and water and sky, anchors on ships and sails in the wind. We are a journey to a destination that shifts every time we dream or fall or leap or weep. We are stars with flaws that still sparkle  and shine.”

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