We reviewed this one for the Kitty Critics' Corner a while back and it was Azrael's award winner for March 1999. I found Williams' narrative style so beautiful that it didn't even occur to me that someone might find the subject matter to be depressing. That is, until my reading group read it as a group selection and several people had to be encouraged to continue on in it. To my best understanding, most if not all of those who did finish the book loved it. My best description of the book still has to be a hauntingly beautiful treatise on love in all its dimensions (filial, paternal, erotic, mystical, etc.). It's also very Irish, although Williams' brand of mystical realism tended to remind me of Laura Esquivel's Like Water For Chocolate. Nicholas and Isabel, the protagonists of Four Letters of Love are each burdened by the sorrows of their childhoods. Their destinies are linked through Nicholas' father's artistic masterpiece -- his expression of the divine.
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