4.0 out of 5 stars
A book about the freedom to love, and to be loved, 11 July 2011
By Sally (Bibrary Book Lust) - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: An Expanded Love (Paperback)
This is a story that's all about love, affection, intimacy, and emotional happiness. It's a story about expanded relationships, with men and women loving one another freely, without prejudice, and without commitment. There's a wonderful recurring image in the book where one family has a chalkboard in the bathroom that traces all of the family's expanded relationships. It's like some crazy molecular model, with circles everywhere and lines intersecting, except it's really a relationship tree.
That's not to say the book is all sunshine and happiness. Jacqueline doesn't shy away from exploring the prejudices of society, and the dysfunctional elements of the families we're born into (as opposed to those into which we choose to enter). There are a few scenes of violence here, with homosexuality and polyamory the targets, and there's a very tragic sub-plot involving a polyamorous lesbian and the arranged marriage into which she's being forced by her family. Fortunately, while the book has its struggles and its tensions, the resolutions offered to these darker elements are sufficient to provide hope of happiness, if not to guarantee happiness itself.
This an amazing, ambitious novel that accomplishes precisely what it sets out to do - open our hearts, open our minds, and remind us of how wonderful it is to feel loved. If you're at all curious, but not sure whether you can handle a love story with multiple partners, please do yourself a favour and give it a chance . . . I daresay you won't regret it.