Customer Reviews

Love in the Present Tense

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This story revolves around three main characters: Pearl, a teenage, single mother, her frail (health-wise) son Leonard, and Mitch, the single, male neighbor. Pearl disappears one day and Mitch takes over care of the boy.

Mitch seems an unlikely father - he is involved in his own business and in a long term affair with a clients wife - but somehow he takes to Leonard from the very first and even after Leonard is adopted, can't let him go.

This book is beautifully written - lyrical and sparse in style. The chapters alternate between the voices of the three characters and are not in chronological order - so the reader gets hints and clues as to what happened and what is going to happen. Hyde does a great job building up the suspense. But as wonderful as all that was - it was the characters themselves that drew me in and held me in the story. Even after I finished the book, they are staying with me and I want to hear more about them.

This is a really touching book - without being sappy. I would love another book with these characters.

In the sparse yet beautifully expressed prose Love in the Present Tense is when love, family and commitment arrives in the most unexpected places. When one morning the young Pearl drops her young son Leonard off with Mitch, her next-door neighbor and never returns, Mitch is unanimously left to pick up the pieces.

Pearl is a single mother who absolutely adores Leonard and she has tried to construct a loving, if unconventional family around him. But her affection and devotion is tempered by a calamitous past, for Leonard was a child born of chaos and murder. When she was thirteen, a white cop in Los Angeles, picked her up at a bus stop, and pretending to drive her home, seduced her.

In her adolescent anguish, Pearl confuses his kindly but casual intentions with love. The encounter turns deadly. Upon discovering he has his own family, she shoots him with his own gun right between the eyes, "where he stood with no pants on." The damage is well and truly done, the legacy of that fateful night forever etched in time. Pearl knows she is pregnant, "I had that baby in me, just of that night, and I knew it."

Time passes, Pearl moves on and Mitch - who makes a lucrative living as a website developer - is left to look after the young Leonard, to feed and clothe him and pay for an emergency eye operation to prevent the boy from going blind. Even when Mitch is forced to give Leonard up and he is fostered out to a kindly - but poorer couple - Leonard still views Mitch as his chief unofficial guardian, his dependable mentor and best friend.

Both Mitch and Leonard end up needing each other in a special way. For Leonard, certain things he remembers are permanently engraved in his psyche. He knows that Pearl will always be a part of him and she constantly comes to him in all kinds of ways, through candle flames, rain and little birds.

But as Leonard grows older, Mitch notices he dances weirdly close to the edge of danger - real physical danger. At eighteen he embarks on a kind of spiritual quest. Continually haunted by Pearl's memory, he has had a giant tattoo of a cross put on his back and constructs homemade hang glider to fly off a local cliff, hoping he can transcend the earth-bound and finally achieve some kind of connection with his mother.

Meanwhile, Mitch has his own demons to contend with. Caught in an affair with an older woman, the wife of the Mayor, Mitch spends much of his adult life playing second fiddle to her whims and demands. The relationship with the unobtainable Barb sends a shudder of ambiguity below the outwardly easy pursuit of sexual pleasure. For the Mayor treats Mitch like his own son, welcoming him into his home, and even going so far as to obtain profitable Internet contracts for him.

And what of Pearl? As the years pass, Mitch and Leonard have no idea whether she's even alive or dead. Yet both manage to maintain a united front, becoming ever closer, calmly enduring an increasing sense of imminent catastrophe. Pearl's ultimate punishment for her crime and her eventual spiritual redemption provides the catalyst for this story.

Author Catherine Ryan Hyde spins a familiaral tale, presenting the ticking time bomb of love in all its various machinations. And as the story switches backwards and forwards through the decades, recounting the lives of three main characters, you really get the feeling that these rather damaged people are just so desperately trying to connect.

Pearl and Leonard are perpetually coupled, entwined almost spiritually and his eventual unscrambling of the mystery of her disappearance provides one of the most affecting passages of the novel.

Whilst Mitch's affair with Barbara is his own unraveling; he has trouble shifting gears, perhaps because he is somewhat set in his ways, but also because age has somewhat tempered him, "I was still too unbalanced, it would have felt too callous to have left her."

Love in the Present Tense is all about people who must learn to pull through, become accustomed and even make peace with their irreversible past. The novel is just as much about forgiveness as it is the transcendent nature of love. In one instance, Leonard calls this love "forever love," and he's probably right, because when you love somebody so much, no matter what happens, it will never change, never alter. Mike Leonard May 06.

Some author's names on a dust jacket will immediately catch my attention - one such name is Catherine Ryan Hyde. For this reader/listener, Funerals for Horses and Pay It Forward were imaginative, can't-put-down stories that revealed workings of the human heart. She write with authority and perception, always telling a tale that holds deeper meanings.

Listeners to this audio edition read by a gifted ensemble cast will find themselves pondering the importance, the meaning of family and the transcendental quality of love. The narrative is propelled by each of three voices as Pearl, Leonard and Mitch offer their perspective on what life has brought to them.

In the beginning it seems as if Pearl never has a chance. Her mother is a drug addict and Pearl becomes pregnant at 13. Not only does she become pregnant but on that same night she accidentally kills her child's father. So begins a life on the run as she tries to protect her son, Leonard, who is born with an eye disease and preternatural wisdom.

As fate or luck would have it when Leonard is five their neighbor is Mitch, a young man who operates a home business. The boy is left in his care while Pearl works. However, one day Pearl does not come home leaving Leonard to wonder if there really is such a thing as "forever love" as his mother had promised, and Mitch to try to adapt to his new role as a quasi parent.

As always, Hyde tugs on heartstrings as she tells this story of three needy people with poignancy and insightfulness.

- Gail Cooke

The author tells this great story in a unique way - through the eyes and voice of each of the characters, bouncing back and forth between characters in different times of their lives. You see their fears and love as it unfolds in different ways for each of them in their own time. I couldn't put this book down - highly recommended.

This is by the same author as Pay it Forward. If you enjoyed that book, you will undoubtedly enjoy this one.
It is just a little off putting at first to jump around between characters and years, but once you get the rhythm it becomes much easier to read and the characters are so interesting that
you quickly adjust to the timeline and changing people.
Very pleasant read.

Don't let the sad and violent beginning of this book stop you from continuing to read it. This is truly a wonderful little story about a mother's undying love for her son. It has an almost spiritual feel to it, but not in a new age kinda way. Really loved the book, and probably would not have read it without it being on my bookclub list.

What a touching story! It only took me 3 days to finish it because I was really enjoying it :)

Review from [...]

Title: Love in the Present Tense
Author: Catherine Ryan Hyde
Grade: A
Ideal Audience: Boys & Girls 14+

Summary: Pearl didn't mean to shoot Leonard's father (although, at the time, she didn't know he had fathered anybody--much less her son), who, just to top things off, was a cop. But she did what she did, so she ran. It was the day of her thirteenth birthday.

Now Leonard is five years old. He and Pearl are living next to Mitch, a man in his early twenties. Usually Pearl drops her son off at Mitch's house during the day while she works. Mitch and Leonard form a close bond, but neither are prepared for the time when Pearl simply doesn't return at the end of the day to pick up Leonard.

Pearl has disappeared without a trace. Mitch is left to raise Leonard as if the latter were Mitch's own son. Mitch's life becomes tangled as his affair with the mayor's wife continues, and Leonard, as he grows up, is left in a strange state of mind as he wonders why Pearl did what she did.

My thoughts: I doubt my summary did justice to this novel. Love in the Present Tense is absolutely fantastic. Catherine Ryan Hyde explores complicated relationships, children growing up too quickly, and glimmers of light in the dark.

It can also be read at many different levels, so I'd recommend this to pretty much everybody: it's not fluff, but you can read it simply and quickly if you'd like; you can dig much deeper into it; or you can do anything in between.

By the author of Pay it Forward, this story takes place over the course of 25 years. Three characters take turns telling their side of the story:
# Pearl, who, at the age of thirteen, has a son, Leonard;
# Leonard, whose mother disappears when he is 5 years old;
# Mitch, their 25-year-old neighbor, who takes on the responsibility of caring for Leonard after his mother disappears.

It explores the meaning of family, the power of love, and the difficulty some people have in expressing it. The characters just draw you in from start to finish.

A disquieting, tender, moving book, with an hilarious touch here & there, about a little boy's search for his mother, who vanishes suddenly, and the man who takes care of him after she has gone. Written in first-person by each main character, the story is captivating from page one.

Many reviewers have written an excellent summary of the events so I shall not go into details, but I feel compelled to say that if you are looking for a book speaking about pure, selfless love, this IS it. In the present tense.