Mrs.Meeseeks

I read this book on recommendation and it was highly praised. The overwhelmingly positive comments speak for themselves. This made me even more disappointed with what I had in front of me. CN: I will use spoilers in this review. Positives first: the plot is a strong one. A childhood love in the civil war, a separation, child loss, Réunion and illness. This plot had potential. The book is easy to read, requires little interpretation and is easy to understand. Unfortunately, that's about it. The characters are incredibly flat, cheesy and clichéd. The single widower is overwhelmed, the teenage daughter is bitchy and the foreign aunt is a little crazy. Written so often, read so often. And we don't learn any more about the characters in the book than this character description. Instead of taking a closer look at the characters and giving them more depth, we get to read a fig tree's page-long monologues about animals and plants, which add nothing to the story and are just boring. The description of the surroundings of Cyprus could have come straight out of a tourist advertisement. Everything always smells great, everything is green and blooming and the best food is everywhere. There is surprisingly little mention of the civil war in the book. Every now and then someone dies, soldiers are always present, mostly caricatures as drunken Brits in the background and occasionally a brother disappears. The change of perspective and time period happens so quickly that it is impossible to put oneself in anyone's shoes. Many questions remain unnecessarily unanswered, and the perspective of a tree seems rather silly. One star for the plot, that's it.