I understood his desire of wanting to marry and I initially felt sorry that she could not feel that it was OK to love her husband as well as the memory of her past love. However it amazed me how far he was willing to go to get his way with his marriage and his career. ( )

didn't like the old-fashioned, formal writing style; struggled to finish it. ( )

A story that I plugged along and before I knew it, I was hooked! The more I read, the more I realized that the main character was frightening and slightly insane. I was sure he would do harm to his wife and who else? I won't spoil it for anyone but an interesting, riveting read. ( )

ALL HE EVER WANTED is a story of obsession. It is fiction written in the form of a memoir by a man who had been obsessed with his wife.

I felt sorry for this man, Nicholas, for about the first two thirds of the book. I forgave him his faults when (as I see from previous reviews I’ve read) others did not because it was apparent to me that this memoir is Nicholas’s confession. He now sees his errors and is sorry. Later, though, I wondered: is Nicholas sorry because of what he had done or does he just feel sorry for himself.

Throughout ALL HE EVER WANTED, Nicholas gives hints of the outcome. Even so, this “memoir” is unpredictable. I didn’t know, while I read the last third of the book, why he was writing this. Was it meant to be a memoir, a confession, or a justification for bad acts?

I’m afraid that some other reviewers gave this book a low rating because they found the narrator/main character to be despicable. As I see it, Anita Shreve’s INTENTION was to, first, show what a sap Nicholas was and, later, horrify the reader with Nicholas’s actions. I don’t rate a book on the likability of its characters. ( )

Ik heb verschillende boekene van Anita Shreve met plezier gelezen maar dit vond ik echt een saai boek. ( )