Love is a Thief by Claire Garber

About the book

Love is a Thief is a contemporary novel by Claire Garber. The book was published by Mira Books on 5^th July and it is 448 pages long. I received an e-book for review through NetGalley.

Plot Synopsis

After having a bit of a break down after a break up, Kate Winters begins her mission to take back what love stole from her!

Kate has been extremely unlucky in love. She’s the girl without a boyfriend, without children and it’s looking as though she won’t get her happily ever after. Now that she isn’t constantly thinking about a man, Kate wants to get to know herself again, finding out what it is she actually likes. She wants to do the things she never got a chance to do because she fell in love! Kate not only takes on the mission herself but extends it to women around the country.

What I thought

Recently I have been taking a bit of a gamble on books requested on NetGalley. While I love reading in the young adult genre, I sometimes need something different and this is where chick-lit comes in.

The idea behind Love is a Thief was fantastic. How many times have I given something up because of being with a certain boyfriend… I could absolutely relate to protagonist Kate. She moved to France and lived with her ski instruction (who she thought was her soul mate) there only to break up and be forced to move back home. Kate felt as though she had wasted so much time being who her boyfriend wanted her to be instead of doing things for herself. The worst thing is, she works for a magazine called True Love; how much of a bummer must that be when you’ve got a broken heart?

So, she writes an article without permission about what love stole from her and what she wanted to do about that. The response she gets from women all over the country is phenomenal and even though the magazine aren’t happy about what Kate has done, they can’t ignore what their readers want. Not only does the book follow Kate and her lost dreams, but also those of people around her and those of others. I really enjoyed reading about the range of things that people thought love had stolen from them and how they intended to go about fixing that.

The characters in this book were very varied and provided quite a lot of comedy; this was mainly due to the fact that there were a fair few large and loud personalities. What made the characters so great in this book though is that they were so real. The objectives planned by women throughout the book are more than reasonable and I could certainly relate to what some of them wanted to do. It also showed just how different people are and the things that people tend to miss out on in life.

Unfortunately, the romance is quite lacking in Love is a Thief. There is a love interest for Kate in the form of Peter Parker (no, not like Spiderman). While there was so much that could have been done with this pairing, it always fell quite short. Just when I thought something was going to happen, it didn’t. The two have a bit of a history as they were friends when they were children and then something happened to make Peter move away without a word. This was the most interesting thing about Kate and Peter and without this, there wouldn’t really have been much point to Peter’s character.

Overall, Love is a Thief is a pretty good book. There could have been more romance but the actual plot and subject of the story was really captivating.