Book Review - Eat Pray Love

The story was original and beautifully captured as the author effortlessly ensures that the imagery was perfect yet you were not overloaded with details, like I said; perfect! The style of writing was of a free and easy style, being chatty, genuine and humorous throughout in a very satisfying manner.

When Elizabeth desperately realises at the age of thirty- one that she no longer feels what she had at the beginning of her eight year relationship and a six year marriage, her life starts to fall apart. A premature midlife crisis with a rough, stretched out divorce where her husband rips her off and an excruciatingly painful rebound fling only leaves her more distraught, wounded and apathetic.

However, Elizabeth emerges damaged and broken hearted yet pertinacious to find herself and what she had been missing out on. So it seems perfectly normal when she finds herself in Indonesia being told her fate by a toothless medicine man, which includes her coming to stay with him in Bali. So she starts in Italy where she indulges herself in beautiful words, places, food and people as she tries to start pulling herself together as a person and spiritual being. Next it’s India where she finds a different, deeper sort of life where she learns to meditate and finds enlightenment through scrubbing temple floors. Then finally in Bali, she reunites with the medicine man, who by this point had aquatinted with her several years ago. He teaches her, (as well as the reader) how to see the world differently and how to perceive your fears.

We waltz through this book that accounts Elizabeth’s trippy, spontaneous and thoughtful year as if we were her; feeling her pain when she is hurt, making friends with the wonderfully memorable people she has met and become the egging voice in her head when she is meant to be concentrating. But above all, we feel her love and thus fall desperately and harmoniously in love when Elizabeth finally opens up herself after a whole year and a half of celibacy, to trust and love again. We truly do watch this true character that we have gotten to know like a sibling, as she takes a leap into a new life and becomes a transformed and extremely happy woman.

Eat Love Pray is most definitely worthy of being the battered-spine book on every bedside table and every bookshelf; having just finished the book I find myself fighting the pressing urge to pick up the book and read it again.

Eat Pray Love has been made into a movie starring Julia Roberts which is said to be released in theaters around August.