Rating: 
Summary: Will trigger your depression
Review: I had only read the occasional magazine article by Amy Bloom, and i liked her style. However, this novel is a complete disappointment. For one, there is nothing lovable in Elizabeth as a character. She is a sad and selfish person who does absolutely nothing to redeem herself. In fact, she acknowledges at the end how she is 'dangerous' to her own son. Elizabeth has drifted through life being no good, knowing it, doing nothing about it, and taking advantage of whoever dropped by her side, like a leech. Maybe it all started because her parents were very indifferent to her, maybe because she felt abused by the variety of pedophiles that crossed her path. Why the revelations about her mother's past? Did that explain anything about her behavior? I was repulsed by Max, because he is unwilling to justify his fatal attraction for Elizabeth ('whatever is, is'), and (to Amy Bloom's credit) also because of his gruesome physique. I did not understand how Huddie's uncle would "root" for his nephew and then intercept the love letters he was sending Elizabeth. The relationship between Huddie's parents was never made clear. Also, there were too many people narrating the story. The ending is a sheer cliff. What kind of resolution was achieved? The part i enjoyed the most was when Elizabeth took care of Mrs. Hill, and the relationship between the two. Amy Bloom does a very good job describing physicality and the erotic nuances of melons (make sure you always wash your fruit after purchase. Who knows what your grocer had been licking). Other than that, this novel is a humongous disappointment.
Rating:
Summary: A disappointment
Review: I loved the first chapter where young insecure Elizabeth takes such delight in loving and being loved. Then it turned out that Amy Bloom didn't mean it at all. Instead of love inventing anyone, the characters just let love ruin their lives for no good reason at all. Charming Elizabeth has one sordid affair and one high-school romance that doesn't quite work out and then she just gives up completely and sinks in to a slough of despond so boring the novel won't even talk about it. This book turned out to be a disappointment and a cop-out.
Rating: 
Summary: Incredibly depressing, beautifully written
Review: If it weren't for Amy Bloom's writing skills I wouldn't have finished this book. The story was disturbing and the characters were unrealistic. I had a hard time finding any sympathy or attachment for the main character and most of the subsequent characters. But her prose kept me reading to the end.
Rating: 
Summary: Poetic justice
Review: It is rare that an book's plot can be obscured by its writing. Love Invents Us is rare indeed. Perfectely capturing every detail, every last moment in prose stunning enough to make you return to read it twice, Amy Bloom will not dissapoint.
Rating: 
Summary: The Unrealistic Life of Liz
Review: Love Invents Us, by Amy Bloom was an intereseting novel, about a young girl growing up through the years of High School,and beyond. Although this book seems like it may relate to teenagers, or college students, it is not a book that many students can relate too. The main charachter experiences love affairs that are not very likely to happen to the average student. The writing of this book is very simple, and easy to read, however because of the context, and general ideas of the novel, it is very important that only a mautre audience reads it. The writing style is appropriate for a middle school age, but the topic is only suitable for a high school level,or possibly beyond. This book may be found interesting by some, because it can express a learning experience,and bring awarness to some of the problems teenagerse experience during their adolesence. However at the same time, it is somewhat unrealistic, and uncommon to the going-ons of life today. Personally, I disliked the book, and do not reccomend it because it is unrealistic, and I feel there was too much detail described in areas that I didn't care to raed about. Love Invents Us, by Amy BLoom, is not a book that most people would enjoy reading.
Rating:
Summary: Very good
Review: Love Invents Us, it seems, is more of collection of stories gathered around two central characters, Huddie and Elizabeth, than it is a novel. I know this may seem unfair to the author, who has written some wonderful short pieces. But something about the "novel" doesn't seem to hang together, other than the obvious symmetry of Elizabeth at the end (left out for those who haven't read it), and getting back together with Huddie at 40. I understand that Elizabeth does not have to be likeable, and I find that as a reader I really don't care for her much, beyond her relationship with Mrs. Hill. She is eccentric, of course, which is fine, and she is understandable, with all her seminal family problems in adolescence, but she never seems to transcend her problems at all. The best part of her -- passion -- is brilliantly and effectively explored, but I keep hoping for more. More than narcissism, I suppose. Beyond these criticisms, the novel has some brilliant moments. Huddie, for example, examining the produce and using this as a metaphor for longing and sensuality. The marshmallows were great! I think if Ms. Bloom stepped back a bit from her analytic self, she would find a better writer. In the meantime, this is an excellent work -- but she can do better.
Rating:
Summary: sad and eloquent but ultimately unsatisfying
Review: Once I picked this book up I did not put it down until I'd read the last word on the last page. Elizabeth is a compelling character, strong and stupid by turns - her lovers real but like most lovers don't feed her soul. When I got to the last page I couldn't believe Ms. Bloom had ended her story. Though I was glued to the book throughout, I found the ending terribly unsatisfying - but perhaps that was what was called for in this book full of the sorts of contradictions that make up a life.
Rating:
Summary: Lines out of Lolita's diary
Review: One is reminded of the child, Lolita, and her emergence fromnymph to woman. If only Nabokov could have been as boldly honest asBloom's narrator! This is a classic of literature, expressing so well what so many women only dare to pen in their diaries.
Rating:
Summary: Ordinary people rendered extraordinary in poetic prose
Review: Ordinary people--the kind we meet in the deli and barely notice--are rendered extrardinary through Amy Bloom's knowing eyes. So many stark truths about life's realities are spoken so matter-of- factly that one could miss them if one were not paying attention. And in the lives of Elizabeth, Huddie and Max, so separate yet so closely interleaved--like contiguous layers of onionskin at opposing poles--we see patterns that repeat themselves in childhood, at puberty, in middle age--ways of being that took root before we knew what we were doing. "Elizabeth knew that the bad things that had happened to her were no worse than other people's bad things; they were pretty small potatoes, in fact, compared to terminal cancer, death by famine, incest, quadriplegic paralysis." p.132 Amy Bloom's lyrical writing is like a benediction on what, in less skillful hands, would be tawdry lives. Love not only invents Elizabeth Taube; it is the driving force of her existence and the exclusive theme of the novel. So here is a syllogism for you: If love invents us, we exist through love; if existence is good, then love is good. Ah, but is it? Here, surely, is love gone awry. Here is a young girl irretrievably damaged by the illicit desires of older men who should have known better. Old Mr. Klein's furs turn the lost child Elizabeth into a beautiful princess, but the damage is done, the acceptance of the unacceptable is learned before puberty. Ignored by her parents and deprived of wholesome love, Elizabeth inevitably takes love where it is offered. Who among us could not accept love that is freely given; nevermind, the consequences. The pattern is set and pursues Elizabeth as theme and variations through middle age. Bloom's toneless style, that infuses the scenes with the love she writes about, renders Elizabeth's various loves as beautiful things, to be savored and thought over. Who among us has not had a crush on a high school English teacher? From Bloom's imagination unfolds the probable outcome of a teenage crush acted out to its less-than-ideal conclusion. Here, in the sweetest language and imagery possible, so sweet we almost don't recognize it for the horror that it is, is a story of a woman, from childhood to middle age, who's damaged life seems almost enviable it is presented to us so beautifully and so lovingly. Despite the underside-of-life quality of the relationships, Elizabeth is like a mirror. I see myself in her deepest feelings, the temptations life has offered, the damaging random events that set us irretrievably down certain paths. Perhaps Elizabeth never aspired to more than the fundamentals: life, love, motherhood--and then we die. She starts out alone and in the end she is still alone. For her, not only is love universal, it is also eternal. These ordinary lives take on almost epic proportion through exquisite portraiture. Bloom's lyric brush strokes fill us with nostalgia for Elizabeth's lost potential. But perhaps nothing was lost after all, because she learned the message some say we are here to learn: Let us all love one another. Let us speak together of love, but not romance. Romance died at Furs by Klein. No one lives happily ever after, yet here they fail to do so in the most eloquently poetic manner. What a pitty to lose romance before puberty. When I was ten, the same age as Elizabeth Taube, I fell and cut my knee open--a great gaping gash that stretched so badly as it healed it looked like my knee had a mouth. The first thing I thought of when I saw the wound was that now I could not grow up to be Miss America. I actually mourned this loss for many years. But this was as nothing compared to what Elizabeth lost at the same age. Adventures of the heart, especially those with forbidden overtones, consume us and drag us along with their powerful pull--passion, desire, compulsion to know what will be. Elizabeth's affaires de coeur are our own fantasies played out to their illogical conclusion. One might be tempted to use the word "perverse" in describing her obsessions, but we know too many of us have had brushes with the likes of Mr. Klein, or have had crushes on teachers like Max Stone, or have had boyfriends of whom no one approved, or have loved and been unmercifully used by a manipulative adult. Intimations of such near things are evoked, conjured up and as these dramas play themselves out in Elizabeth's life, we see the mirror reflect back at us and we feel the common bond of her humanity. Love, indeed, does invent us.
Rating:
Summary: Underdeveloped, over-sexed characters
Review: The title of this book should be "Sex Invents Us", since Amy Bloom has fallen into the trap of many modern authors, focusing almost solely on the sexual experiences of her characters in telling their life stories. Are all the defining moments in Elizbeth's troubled childhood sexual? What about the social ostracism she experienced, and the effects of cold, distant parents? Only the sexual abuse is spelled out in excruciating detail. Why did an adult man fall for Elizabeth? What was Max thinking? In Lolita, the reader was privy to Humbert's deluded rationalization of sexula desire for a child. In this book, the reader is never given a glimpse of how Max justified his actions to himself. I repeatedly found myself asking the question - why?The reader also knows that Huddie and Elizabeth had great sex together from the start. Is that what makes them life-long soulmates? How did these characters relate as people outside the sexual arena. Once again, I was left wondering why the connection between these characters is so strong. This book was a major disappointment. Next time, Ms.Bloom, give me a story - not a sexual dossier. I know you've got it in you!
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