The Authenticity Project - Book Review

Clare Pooley’s The Authenticity Project is an exaggerated utopian dream which is a light-hearted and a feel-good read. The book begins when Julian who decides to put across his most authentic self in a book and leaves it in a cafe named Monica’s Café.  The story is all about what happens thereafter. As the book passes from one hand to another, we are introduced to new characters and how their lives are. Also, how the book influences or changes their lives forever.

Julian Jessop is seventy-nine years old. He is lonely and regrets the way his younger self lived. Monica is thirty-seven and is scared about ending up as a barren spinster. Hazard is an alcohol and drug addict who is in a journey of recovery. Riley is charming and easy-go-lucky foreigners who is travelling around. Alice is a new mother struggling with changes in her body, marriage and life per se. She is also a social media influencer where she posts about her “perfect” life. Lizzie a sixty-five years old nosy lady who is also a retired nurse.

The book is intriguing in a way because it addresses the current situation which is lack of physical connection between people. We hardly meet people anymore. We don’t even call people. We just send messages. Or feel connected just by seeing their Instagram and Facebook feeds. Instead of connecting people together in an effective way, it has only separated them further. Also, the fluidity in the narration keeps us hooked to the book. The characters are as good as real. But the fact that people are so thoughtful (all of them actually) and go out of their ways to help each other makes it quite utopian. Everything is white here. No other shade at all.

But the book is a piece of happiness and a sheer pleasure to read. It would make us happy for the characters and makes us sigh wondering if only life was so simple. At least, happiness is guaranteed. Highly recommend this book!

 

Details of the Book

No. of Pages    : 405 pages

Language         :  English

From the book blurb

The story of a solitary green notebook that brings together six strangers and leads to unexpected friendship, and even love.

Julian Jessop, an eccentric, lonely artist and septuagenarian believes that most people aren't really honest with each other. But what if they were? And so he writes--in a plain, green journal--the truth about his own life and leaves it in his local café. It's run by the incredibly tidy and efficient Monica, who furtively adds her own entry and leaves the book in the wine bar across the street. Before long, the others who find the green notebook add the truths about their own deepest selves--and soon find each other in real life at Monica's café.

The Authenticity Project's cast of characters--including Hazard, the charming addict who makes a vow to get sober; Alice, the fabulous mommy Instagrammer whose real life is a lot less perfect than it looks online; and their other new friends--is by turns quirky and funny, heartbreakingly sad and painfully true-to-life. It's a story about being brave and putting your real self forward--and finding out that it's not as scary as it seems. In fact, it looks a lot like happiness.

The Authenticity Project is just the tonic for our times that readers are clamoring for--and one they will take to their hearts and read with unabashed pleasure.

Author

Clare Pooley graduated from Newnham College, Cambridge and spent twenty years in the heady world of advertising. Clare’s memoir - The Sober Diaries - has helped thousands of people around the world to quit drinking. The Authenticity Project, Clare’s first novel, was a New York Times bestseller, a BBC Radio 2 book club pick, and winner of the RNA debut novel award.