The Painted Room by Lounis Tiar

[Helen2247]

This book absolutely blew me away. It deals with some heavy topics in a sensitive yet powerful way.

We follow a young lady named Vanessa who is convinced she is having a mental breakdown due to her having incredibly vivid hallucinations. These hallucinations always lead her to a flat belonging to a man named Eddie, who is a painter. Her first experience of this is when she is emerging from the toilet at work she finds herself in a huge cornfield with no understanding of how she has got there.

My initial impression of this book (I basically went into this book blind with very little information about the genre/type of style it was) was that it was going to be a fantasy style book and, whilst I do enjoy fantasy books, it’s not a genre I find myself particularly drawn to. That alone gave me some hesitations about whether this was going to be my kind of book.

The novel, however, takes a tragic and heartbreaking twist when, following a seizure, Vanessa undergoes an MRI scan. her illness is something that has affected my close family members so when Vanessa is told this devastating news it hit me harder than it may have done had I not already understood the pain of this diagnosis (again, not me personally but a very close family member I lost to this Illness).

It’s from this moment on that I became truly invested in this novel. Vanessa experiences more hallucinations and lapses of memory due to the effects of the illness. The realm of reality and fantasy collide with Vanessa being able to insert herself into Eddie’s paintings and finding out about his memories and his own past. Eddie becomes an ethereal character who is able to take Vanessa away from the pain of her own reality into a painting ‘world’ where they can just be together, without the limitations of hospital appointments.

The final chapters reveal the truth of what happened to Eddie.
By the end of the novel I had become so invested in both Eddie and Vanessa that this discovery definitely had the intended emotional punch.

I started reading this book yesterday and literally, other than having to go to work, have tried to read this as much as possible over the last 2 days. The writing style wasn’t clunky or reliant on cliches which made this an absolutely wonderful book to read. I don’t normally write reviews of books but this is such a new release i hope many other people give this book a chance by picking it up!