Firstly, I would like to thank Kaleidoscopic Tour, Robert Haywood and Clink Street Publishing for gifting me the book in exchange for an honest review.
The Invisible Tightrope by Robert Haywood is a fictional story about a boy named Chris, who leaves his comfortable life in Nottinghamshire, to help build a school in Ghana as a part of a charity after being influenced by his friend Rebecca. His experiences in Ghana will challenge his beliefs and change his course of life.
The story is basically divided into 3 main parts: His life before Ghana, his life in Ghana, and how his belief system changes after Ghana.
In the first part (i.e. before Ghana), we see a simple boy Chris, struggling to finish school and get into his favorite college and make a career in Psychology. Being a part of a high-achieving family with a feminist mother, Christian has always been a great student. The first half also discusses his multiple relationships (well 3 be exact.!). One with his childhood sweetheart, Pippa (who broke her heart from the start), then his holiday romance Marie, and finally the bartender who saved Chris's life: Nancy. Apart from Pippa, all other love interests were short-lived.
The second part talks about his experiences in Ghana with his friend / final love interest: Rebecca (Becky). He finds comfort in the uncomfortable life in ghana and unravels some questions which had been on his mind since his last trip with his parents.
The final part in the book is his after Ghana life and how his mentality has changed. How he turned from being a thinker to a doer. His goals and aspirations became more clear to him and he finally succeeds in his love life.
To review my opinions and thoughts: I have mixed opinions. I certainly loved Robert's writing style. He has a flow with his writing, where you can read easily and smoothly. He is more into world-building, where he would explain the scene in-depths, making it more visualizing but at the same time, too long to read. I can imagine myself sitting by the poolside, with an iced tea and his book over a long vacation (apparently a lot of scenes from his book :P). But since I am an avid reader and focus on completing my reading goals, I would have preferred a thinner book, which is a little less descriptive.
Talking about the plotline, the experiences in Ghana didn't really felt life-changing / altering. When I first read the extract, I thought the life-changing event in Ghana would be something interesting, but honestly, the Ghana episode was so much limited in the whole book. Even that wasn’t what you would expect to base a book on. I felt as if Dominic had a better story to tell than Chris himself.
There were a lot of God and psychology-related elements and their interconnection that I liked. But as soon as the big questions were raised, they were abruptly shifted to some talks about love and having a glass of wine on the poolside (kinda things).
To simply summarise: It was a book about a rich boy from a rich family, who is nice and sweet, who vacations a lot. The boy finds the purpose of his life through a girl (who is kinda annoying honestly) by taking her on paid vacations and tours and spoiling her with his money. It started nicely, the Ghana episode was good I guess but the story fell off completely after that.
As I said earlier, there were a few good things, like the psychology and science-related talks, but there were things that fell off for me: like the after Ghana plot, and too many pages on scenes that felt totally irrelevant. All in all, I give it a 3-star read.
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