Review: Hating Olivia by Mark SaFranko

Title: Hat­ing Olivia

Author: Mark SaFranko

Pub­lisher: Harper Collins

Date (to be) Pub­lished: Novem­ber 2010

Syn­op­sis: (from publisher’s website)

Max Zajack’s life is cheap rooms, dead-​​end jobs, and sui­ci­dal fan­tasies until he meets the allur­ing and mys­te­ri­ous Olivia Aphrodite, and every­thing goes to hell.

Max is a strug­gling musi­cian and wannabe writer. His life is in a rut until one night, while play­ing a gig at a local club, he gazes out into the crowd and sees Olivia. Before long, they are shar­ing a bed and host of dark vices that begin to con­sume them. Their love turns toxic, send­ing them spi­ral­ing down­ward toward the inevitable. Vio­lently roman­tic, vis­cer­ally hon­est, Hat­ing Olivia is the story of two lon­ers whose obses­sive love brings them to the edge of destruction.

Where Did It Come From?

The lovely folks at Harper.

Why Did I Choose It?

It sounded quite inter­est­ing from the descrip­tion so I requested a review copy.

My Review:

This was quite an inter­est­ing read.  It reveals just how far one can lose them­selves in a rela­tion­ship with another per­son.  In this case, it’s not the health­i­est rela­tion­ship, and in the end is quite detri­men­tal to our main char­ac­ter, but while it is a bit anti-​​climatic in the end, the story is well writ­ten and Max man­ages to extri­cate him­self with some­thing left of himself.

There are many other things I could say about this book, but we’ve all been in a rela­tion­ship that maybe wasn’t the best so you know the basic idea.  How­ever, know­ing that this is some­what of a mem­oir for the author, it makes the feel­ings evoked by the inter­ac­tions of the char­ac­ters that much more real.

Def­i­nitely a book to read at least once and I look for­ward to read­ing the fol­low up tale, Lounge Lizards.