Love In The Present Tense

Rating:	★★★
Category:	Books
Genre:	Literature & Fiction
Author:	Catherine Ryan Hyde

How do you go on loving someone who isn't there? The answers are heartbreaking. It will surprise and move you.

The story is just as much about forgiveness, about people who must learn to pull through with their irreversible past, and make peace where love, family and commitment arrives in some of the most unexpected places.

Leonard, Pearl and Mitch, each has a story to tell and as their lives unfold, profound questions arise about the nature of love and family.

Leonard is a wise five-year-old boy with asthma, terrible vision problem, and the ability to captivate everyone he meets.

Pearl is Leonard's devoted teenage mother, a single mother who absolutely adores her young son, and desperately trying to hide a violent secret from her past.

Mitch is Leonard’s 25-year-old next-door neighbour, busy running his own company and having affair with the Mayor’s wife, Barbara.

Life has given Pearl every reason to mistrust people, but circumstances force her to trust her neighbour, Mitch. One day Pearl drops Leonard off with Mitch, and never returns.

The story switches backwards and forwards through the decades, recounting the lives of these three people. The best is reading how Mitch and Leonard grow up together, through the power and the magic of the human heart, ends up needing each other in special ways. Even as Mitch must eventually surrender Leonard to a two-parent home, their bond as parent and child shifts and endures, teaching Mitch the concept of “forever love.”, Leonard still views Mitch as his chief unofficial guardian, his dependable mentor and best friend.

For Leonard, certain things he remembers are permanently engraved in his psyche. He knows that Pearl will always be a part of him, and she constantly comes to him in all kinds of ways, through candle flames, rain and little birds. In the end Leonard is able to answer the questions about his mother’s death and his own background.

Quotes to share:

“He’s been trying to teach me about forever love since he was five years old. I’m a slow learner, and he’s patient.”

“Question: How many angels can dance in the flame of a lighted candle? Answer: Only one but that’s enough.”

“It’s when you love somebody so much that no matter what happens that’ll never change. Like even if you’re gone. It’s still the same. Even if you die. You die, but not the love. Not forever love.”

“If it takes you apart, that’s not love. Love puts you back together.”

“Voluntary blindness is never going to catch on.“

“Because you have a life, if you didn’t, you’d deal with that. But you do. So don’t waste it.”