Name: Pictures of You
Rating: 5.0 (1 reviews)
Author: Caroline Leavitt

About this book

Summary

Book Summary

Paperback Original. Two women running away from their marriages collide on a foggy highway, killing one of them. The survivor, Isabelle, is left to pick up the pieces, not only of her own life, but of the lives of the devastated husband and fragile son that the other woman, April, has left behind. Together, they try to solve the mystery of where April was running to, and why. As these three lives intersect, the book asks, How well do we really know those we love—and how do we forgive the unforgivable?

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Media Reviews

"[T]hough the story stumbles sometimes into too saccharine moments, Leavitt's near bottomless reserve of compassion for her imperfect characters will endear them to readers." - Publishers Weekly

"Whether [they] arrive at happiness separately or together is the question that drives the narrative, and the reader, forward as Leavitt teases suspense out of the greatest mystery of all—the workings of the human heart." - Booklist

"Heartfelt (everyone cries), deft and highly readable fiction." - Kirkus Reviews

"Despite the depressing subject matter, Pictures of You is a thoughtful read that just might encourage you to start saying all those things you keep meaning to tell your loved ones.” - Bust Magazine

"With a tragic story and a cast of highly relatable, flawed characters, Pictures of You is a kind of female version of another novel that revolves around a car accident, John Burnham Schwartz’s haunting Reservation Road." - Venus Zine

This information about Pictures of You was first featured in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.

Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.

Reader Reviews

Write your own review

Louise J

Riveting
Thirty-six-year-old Isabelle is leaving Cape Cod, her husband Luke, has a baby with his new girlfriend. All Isabelle is leaving with is: her cameras, one small suitcase of clothing, and money from the bank. She is heading for New York where she has a cheap, illegal sublet lined up that she can use for as long as she wants and she has her photography business. Driving westbound on US-6 the fog is thick making it impossible to see with headlights so Isabelle turns on her parking lights which provide her with a much better visibility.

About three hours from home, Isabelle very suddenly comes across a car in her lane, stopped and facing the wrong way! A woman is standing outside her car and her little boy climbs out when he sees Isabelle’s car heading straight for them. With no time to stop on the narrow road, she has nowhere to go so she attempts to veer her vehicle around the stopped car. Unfortunately, the little boy begins to run and the mother tries to push herself closer to her own vehicle but Isabelle hits them head-on anyway. We find out that one of the people in the accident dies and the other two live.

I was pulled in and mesmerized from the first page. After we get over the shock of the accident, the book goes on to sort out the lives of four different people. It’s heartbreaking, riveting and deeply moving all at the same time. Leavitt’s ability to write with a realness of life, its people and situations is uncanny. This was a masterfully created and told story.

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Author Information

Biography
Books by this Author

Caroline Leavitt Author Biography

Caroline Leavitt is the New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of Cruel Beautiful World, Is This Tomorrow, Pictures of You, Girls In Trouble, Coming Back To Me, Living Other Lives, Into Thin Air, Family, Jealousies, Lifelines, Meeting Rozzy Halfway. Various titles were optioned for film, translated into different languages, and condensed in magazines.

Her many essays, stories, book reviews and articles have appeared in Salon, Psychology Today, The New York Times Sunday Book Review, The New York Times Modern Love, Publisher's Weekly, People, Real Simple, New York Magazine, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe and numerous anthologies. She won First Prize in Redbook Magazine's Young Writers Contest for her short story, "Meeting Rozzy Halfway," which...

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