Book Reviews – Crazy Love

Crazy love
by Rosetta Allan

I read a previous book by Rosetta Allan, Purgatory, in 2014 and loved it. It was a New Zealand historical novel. Crazy Love couldn’t be more different. Based on Allan’s own life and history with her husband, she tells the story of Vicki and her love and struggles with Billy. The novel starts in 2008 when Billy is trying to get away from Vicki and jumping from the Auckland Harbour Bridge seems like his best option. We then get Vicki’s story, which cuts backwards and forwards from the 1980s to the mid-2000s. There’s a deep attraction between Vicki and Billy but also a dark reality that keeps slicing through their love. Allan writes about a narrow and limited life in Napier in the eighties with drugs, squatting and a dysfunctional family life, and then moves into the mad excess of the advertising world in Auckland in the nineties. This is a raw and clever novel of love, hate, frustration, despair and ultimately acceptance.