Ellen Wittlinger's "Hard Love"

 
          Hard Love is a book written by Ellen Wittlinger. The copyright date is 1999. Here is a short review of this book.
          John is an emotionless teenager who thinks that he has seen it all. His parents are divorced, his father is more involved in his many girlfirends and art fans than he is in his own son's life. His mother refuses to listen to him when anything bad happens, and her husband has plans on moving out of the city. His best and only friend Brian is too involved with getting girls to listen to him. Johns only outlet is the zines he reads. While reading, he comes across a zine with no title, written by "Marisol Guzman, Puerto Rican Cuban, Yankee Cambridge, Massachusetts, rich spoiled lesbian private-school-gifted-and-talented writer virgin looking for love." He is immediately drawn in, and feels like he needs to meet this girl, because she seems like a person that he wants to hang out with, and someone who would really have John figured out. So, he writes her to meet him at a cafe. Almost at once, they understand each other, and become fast friends. Marisol explains to John that she hates liars, and John couldn't agree more--except for the fact that most everything he says to Marisol about himself is a lie, even his own name! As they start to hang out together more, John begins to feel more and more close to her; perhaps too close. But can John keep his lies believable, or will he get tangled in them, and have nowhere to run? Will he risk confessing the truth and ruining his friendship with Marisol? So many things are happening to John, all because he can't escape his own words.
          There are a few main conflicts, all caused by one master conflict in this book: John lies too much. From what I can tell, it is the only socially acceptable way that he knows how to project himself. Most of the book, he is trying to be accepted by any crowd one way or another. From my point of view, the only way that he knows how to do this is by acting cool, not showing emotion, and avoiding his own true colors and his own real life. Because of this, he causes problems such as controversy, having to make up his own scenario, having to lie to others in order to get them to help maintain a lie that he has told someone, and even more knots that he gets himself twisted up in.
          There are two completely different themes in this book. One of them is that the truth will set you free. This is shown because John lies to everyone, and eventually gets lost in all of his lies and deceptions. He can't break free from it all, no matter how hard he tries. He can't undo things either, because it is too late to do so and he is already known as what he is perceived to be through his lies. Another theme is tragedy, because Marisol is a lesbian, and she is also the only one that John really feels like himself around, the only one that John has been interested in. John must face the facts that Marisol will never be anything more to him than a friend, and because he has trouble realizing that, he is on a path to screw himself up.
          Now it's time for my personal review on Hard Love. When I first heard about this book, I had high expectations. I had seen other web reviews on it which had stated that this book was an amazing work of art, and that it won its award for a reason. When I actually read the book, however, I was beyond disappointed. It displayed no depth besides the depression that was in every corner on John's life, and how he felt bad for mistreating his best friend, Brian. It gives you hardly any time to care about the characters, and if it does, those words are wasted on making you hate John and dislike his personality all together. The whole book was set in such a gloomy tone, and that was my first, and final impression on the book. Even one of my best friends had to read this book for school, and wound up using SparkNotes because she couldn't bear to read this horribly gloomy, boring, and all around pointless book anymore. The only time that you feel anything that is somewhat good for John is near to the end, where you feel sympathy and sadness for him. Considering that you feel sadness for the whole book, I would say that the end is nothing new anyway. I would not recommend this book to anyone. Don't waste your time on it. Thank you for reading! Check back soon for more blog entries.