Review: Show Me Where It Hurts by Claire Gleeson

 

Publication Date: April 2015

Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton

Source: borrowed from library

Blurb: How do you survive the unsurvivable?

Rachel lives with her husband Tom and their two children: it's the ordinary family life she always thought she'd have. All of that changes in an instant - when Tom runs the family car off the road, seeking to end his own life, and take his wife and children with him. Rachel is left to pore over the wreckage to try and understand what happened - to find a way to go on living afterwards.

What emerges is a snapshot of what it's like to live alongside someone who is suffering, how you keep yourself afloat when the person you love is drowning, and how you survive irreparable loss.

Impossible to turn away from, Show Me Where It Hurts is a compelling, heartbreaking and ultimately life-affirming story of recovery and unexpected hope.

This was another case of the book being so hyped up and talked about that it just didn't do it for me. 

This debut novel deals with an incredibly dark topic - our main character Rachel is dealing with the aftermath of her husband driving their family to their deaths but both her and her husband , Tom, survive, leaving the children dead. 

I thought the topic of this book was so important and dealt with from the perspective of the person left behind really opened my eyes to the devastation that can be left behind as a result of poor mental health treatment, especially in Ireland. We see not only Rachel, the wife, and her husband as they continue to live after this tragic event, but also Rachel's family, her partner's family, and the public. The scene in the supermarket when she was buying milk and was met with a member of the public who expressed her views really made my heart quicken. My heart broke reading about her mother-in-law, who loved Rachel so much but then, after the event felt so isolated from comforting her. 

The book fluctuates between showing us Rachel's life after the event and her life before - meeting her husband, falling in love and building a life together. We get to see how, throughout his life, her husband had been dealing with seemingly small, isolated moments of poor mental health and then how this terrible tragedy impacted her forever. 

The novel was a dark, frightening but intimate look at how lives can be so affected by mental health. The novel's brevity left me wanting a little more, and some areas I would have enjoyed were fleshed out more. 

Although I rated this book 3 stars, it was an important read. Nothing like anything I have read before and it really opened my eyes to the number of people we are connected to in our everyday lives and how an event can have such a wide reach of effect on our wider circles.