Heart and Soul

If you like this author, you will enjoy this book. It is a light, easy read. I am always a bit sad when I'm done a Binchy book, as I feel as I will miss the characters.

One of my favourite Maeve Binchy books! Many lives explored and she has a wonderful ability to interweave her characters! An excellent book from and excellent author.

A great follow up to Nights of Rain and Stars. I thought it was a good story without that typical Irish Angst that Maeve Binchy is so famous for. In both novels there were likeable characters who weren't constantly doing stupid things to ruin their own lives. Just ordinary people trying their best to muddle through while demonstrating the power of love and kindness. It's also fun how she ties in previous novels & their characters.

This is my first Maeve Binchy novel, and I really enjoyed it. It is lighter and fluffier than what I usually read but I think I needed this. The story is about a heart clinic, and the various people that work or visit it. Their lives both past and present make for an enjoyable read.

I did not like this book at all. I hated how every chapter concerned itself with different characters with hardly any crossover. They were like seperate short stories that only slightly came together at the end of the book......in a very predictable way! The relationships among characters were very poorly developed, as was the story line. It's the first book I read by this author and I must say I was not impressed!!!

Book Review of Maeve Binchy's Heart and Soul by Annette Dunlea
Heart and Soul is a new paperback by Maeve Binchy. It is published by Orion and its ISBN is 1409102319. Maeve Binchy is my favourite author so my expectations were very high and I was not disappointed. She makes something complex look very easy and that is here great skill and strength. She writes of ordinary people with ordinary problems in a compassionate and easy to read fashion. Somehow their lives interweave to make the tale complete. Occasionally she reintroduces old characters into her novels and she has done that her with great ease. This tale is all heart and appropriately it is set in a Dublin heart clinic. The novel is mainly about the first year of St. Brigid's heart clinic. Dr. Clara Casey initially takes on the role as head of cardiology for a year and she sets about acquiring competent and cheerful staff. Soon the clinic becomes an integral part of the community and a symbol of hope. The story examines Dr. Casey's hectic life, her staffs lives and their patients and their interactions with one another and of course their romances. This is not a sad tale of illness but a story of hope and managing cardiac illness to live a fulfilled life.
Reviewed by Annette Dunlea author of The Honey Trap and Always and Forever

What a great book. I love that she continues on in the same area , with same characters and a few new ones thrown in! It only took me two days to read this book and I was disappointed that it was over as I wanted it to go on. I am definitely looking forward to her next book.

I can always count on Maeve Binchy for an enjoyable read! Heart and Soul tells the stories of a collection of interesting people who work in a Heart Clinic. There are some familiar characters from Scarlet Feather and Quintin’s, but one needs not to have read either of these previous books for Heart and Soul to make sense. Binchy’s characters are real and the storyline that is interwoven among them is, as always, brilliant. This was a wonderfully easy and entertaining read to close out 2008.

Maeve Binchey never fails to provide warmth, humour and characters that steal their way into your heart, good and bad.

As Whitehorn Woods centred around "St Ann's Well", Heart And Soul centres around a heart health clinic, and the various romances, heartaches and struggles of the staff and patients. I couldn't help but wonder if Binchy herself has had an experience with heart disease as some of her descriptions and accounts sounded very personal and first-hand.

As always, Binchy delivers a wonderful escape into a wonderful array of characters and their struggles and triumphs, some tiny, some huge, all heartwarming.

Note to others new to Binchy's work: try to read Nights Of Rain And Stars, Evening Class and/or Scarlet Feather - she refers to the characters and stories in those books a great deal throughout Heart And Soul.