Sweet, delicious prose explaining why we wave our arms when we talk weaves into a love story that is not your usual love story. I can hear my mother dismissively saying “it’s weird”. Yes, there are some twists & turns. Stick with it, it will reward you in the end.

I thought the first part of the book was interesting, but the middle lagged quite a bit. I even considered giving up, but I’m so glad I didn’t because the last part of the book tied everything together. This is a very good book about families and writers.

I like the twists in the plot, and I love the prose, but I felt the ending felt anti-climactic. Overall, still a good read.

I’m not usually much for awarding superlatives to books, but tihs is one that deserves every bit of praise I can imagine. It is thoughtful, compelling, and so amazingly original that I even went as far as to hide it from myself so I wouldn’t read it too quickly. I tried to make it last! The characters are so real and interesting, while being completely ordinary at the same time. I feel like I know them, and like I could be Alma Singer wandering NY looking for the solution to the puzzle that is the History of Love. I adored this. Read it!

I enjoyed this book a lot, but didn’t love it enough to want to recommend it to a friend. It reminded me too much of other authors – Jonathan Safran Foer and Dave Eggers springing to mind right off the bat.

This is the best book I have ever read so far. If you only read one book, read this one. The story is so heartbreaking and funny at the same time. And the ending is amazing and sad and just undescribable. Really. Read this book.

I enjoyed History of Love from beginning to end. I have to compare it to Jonathan Safran Foer’s works as much as I’d like to recognize it on its own.

I picked it up at Books Inc because it had a little recommendation note that mentioned Nicole Krauss is Foer’s wife. I thought, why not?

I’m a big fan of Everything is Illuminated and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, but I think her work, though similar to his in many ways, was more thoughtful, more believable, and had more depth.

With multiple protagonists whose lives are intertwined who help each other, unknowingly, to discover themselves, the story is rich with character development and alive with feeling.

It’s about an angel who lives on Ludlow Street. Not far from me, just across Delancey. He’s lived there for so long he can’t remember why God put him on earth. Every night the angel talks aloud to God, and every day he waits for some word from Him. To pass the time, he walks through the city. In the beginning he’s in the habit of marveling at everything. He starts a collection of pebbles. Teaches himself difficult math. And yet. With each day that passes he’s blinded a little less by the beauty of the world. At night the angel lies awake listening to the footsteps of the widow who lives above him, and every morning on the stairs he passes the old man, Mr. Grossmark, who spends his day dragging himself upstairs and down, upstairs and down, muttering, Who’s there? So far as he can tell that’s all he ever says, except for once when out of nowhere he turned to the angel as he passed on the stairs and said, Who am I? which so startled the angel who never speaks and is never spoken to that he said nothing, not even: You’re Grossmark, the human being. The more sadness he sees, the more his heart begins to turn against God. He starts to roam the streets at night, stopping for anyone who looks like they need an ear. The things he hears-it’s too much. He can’t understand it. When he asks God why He’s made him so useless, the angel’s voice cracks trying to hold back angry tears. Eventually he stops talking to God altogether. One night he meets a man under a bridge. They share the vodka the man has in a brown bag. And because the angel is drunk and lonely and angry with God, and because, without his even knowing it, he feels the urge, familiar among humans, to confide in someone, he tells the man the truth: that he’s an angel. The man doesn’t believe him, but the angel insists. The man asks him to prove it, and so the angel lifts his shirt despite the cold and shows the man the perfect circle on his chest, which is the mark of an angel. But that means nothing to the man, who doesn’t know from the mark of angels, so he says, Show me something God can do, and the angel, naive like all angels, points to the man. And because the man thinks he’s lying, he punches the angel in the stomach, sending him tottering backwards off the pier and plunging into the dark river. Where he drowns, because one thing about angels is that they can’t swim.

- nicole krauss