Review: Follow Your Heart, Susanna Tamaro.

@debbies.little.bookshelf

A story that makes you connect with the desire to be true to yourself and your heart, despite the unwise decisions that we may make along the way.

In Follow Your Heart, a grandmother writes letters to her granddaughter, who left her home in Italy to travel to America. It is a reflection on life, love, and lessons that provoke the reader into contemplating their own decisions. It is full of wise quotes, funny times, and sad moments. It is raw and transparent and honest, I really loved this book.

My good friend, Alessio, recommended this to me. At some point we were best friends but we went our separate ways, only to reconnect 5 years later when I drunkenly told his younger brother how much I love and missed him on Christmas Eve. Alessio texted me soon after that to meet for a coffee, and we did. We discussed life and heartbreak and laughed a lot, he recommended this book to me that day.

I ordered it from World Of Books and it arrived with a message from 1999, a Lionel gifting it to a Michelle. “I wish that this book will move you as much as it did me… this is a love story but I assure you it is not of the ‘romance’ genre. It is a story of love, hope, & courage.”

Love, hope, and courage were the three things I needed the most at the point in my life when Alessio suggested this book to me. This little account is to share my love of books, and there are books that move a you more than others, mostly because of how you’ve come by them and when you choose to read them. But, this account is also to show appreciation for the people in my life and how I see each of them in different characters and worlds that I read about. I love when books make me feel something the way this did and there is something really beautiful about someone knowing you well enough to recommend a story that will move you. To be loved is to be known.