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Fates and Furies
by Lauren Groff
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Every story has two sides. Every relationship has two perspectives. And sometimes, it turns out, the key to a great marriage is not its truths but its secrets. Lauren Groff presents the story of one such marriage over the course of twenty-four years. At age twenty-two, Lotto and Mathilde are tall, glamorous, madly in love, and destined for greatness. A decade later, their marriage is still the envy of their friends, but with an electric thrill we understand that things are even more complicated and remarkable than they have seemed. Every story has two sides. Every relationship has two perspectives. And sometimes, it turns out, the key to a great marriage is not its truths but its secrets. At age twenty-two, Lotto and Mathilde are tall, glamorous, madly in love, and destined for greatness.…
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"One, because I love it. If you haven’t read it yet, you absolutely need to. But the reason I thought it was important for navigating your twenties is that we see these two characters throughout their lives. We see how the decisions they make in their early twenties extend through their late fifties and until their deaths. It’s also one of the most realistic depictions of a relationship I’ve seen in a book. So often in books, we either get the characters who are destined to be together, and they get together and that’s the end. Or, we see the dissolving of a marriage or a love. It was incredibly powerful to read a story about a growing love, and how there are cracks in the façade. These two people are incredibly relatable in different ways, and every young person should have that relationship not as a model, but as an example. I was sad when the first narrative ended, because I thought, ‘I was just getting into his head!’ But Groff gets back in my good graces immediately with an equally compelling character in Mathilde. Also, when you’re a young person you can be incredibly narcissistic. Fates and Furies does this amazing thing of forcing you to slip every interaction and recognise that you’re not the only one in that relationship, and that the other person also has a backstory and internal life that you should pay attention to."