Good Intentions: ‘Captivating and heartbreaking’ Stylist

Product Information

This is the only logical (and, really, acceptable) ending to the book, so it’s important that you sympathise with them (mostly Yasmina though, to be honest). It's very easy for us to partake in their ignorance and bigotry when we avoid ever confronting them about it due to preconceived notions about their capacity to learn, and I'm glad to see a South Asian author so explicitly criticizing it and refusing to absolve our generation of blame. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life. It's heartbreaking to watch Yasmina, a bright, dedicated, and loving girlfriend, suffer through a debilitating four years of growing self-doubt and worthlessness over the way that Nur treats her. Regret begins to tug then, as Nur wonders if he should have told them first, tested it with them, but that moment has long passed.

But as everything he holds dear is challenged, he is forced to ask, is love really a choice for a second-generation immigrant son like him? I can see that this book will be popular with some readers but it just didn't do it for me this time.On the surface their relationship is a happy one but there is a persistent uncomfortable undercurrent, Nur has been keeping Yasmina a secret from his family the whole time.

The story also ended when there was a conclusion about the main leads' relationship, but I also wanted to know more about the side characters e. Although this book is jam-packed with romance and relationships and love, it also discusses much deeper subjects and ideas that are uncanny for a romance novel. Although this was a little bit in the “millennials and their painful love” genre (I seem to have read a lot of books in this area: “Open Water”, etc. Yanagihara ( The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book.All the dotting around to different time frames before that builds a nuanced and realistic portrayed of a young man too convinced of his own perceptions to countenance anyone else’s: will he learn from these experiences?

I think in some ways, I can understand the purpose behind it so that it can shape the story of the main relationship, but for the most part, I felt kind of lost. Deftly transporting readers between that first night and the years beyond, Good Intentions exposes with unblinking authenticity the complexities of immigrant families and racial prejudice. There I was getting their big thoughts and feelings in pages and pages of dialogue (‘you made me feel small’ , ‘I didn’t mean too’, ‘are you ashamed that I’m black? The two try living for themselves and hiding their relationship from their parents but when years go by, the secrecy ends up taking a toll.The problems clearly are within him and not his family (who he keeps blaming) holding him from realising his romantic ambitions.