I really really really wanted to love this book but had some trepidation because of my aversion to Hemingway. (As an English major in college, I nearly delayed graduation because of the requirement to have a course focused on a major author and the only two choices that quarter were Hemingway and Henry James – EEEK!) Anyway, I did appreciate McLain’s Circling the Sun, and I was curious about Martha Gellhorn so, hoping that this would focus on her life and adventures as a war correspondent (and not be just her as Hemingway’s appendage), I happily received a copy of Love and Ruin from Random House/Ballantine and NetGalley in exchange for my honest review.

Martha was one of Hemingway’s wives, and their relationship and marriage happened during the time of the Spanish Civil War and into World War II. As a young woman in 1937, Martha/Marty, who has always bravely sought adventure, travels alone to Madrid to write about the Spanish Civil Way. Her special focus in talking to people the telling their stories of being caught in a horrific war. She was incredibly strong as she worked to make her name as a war correspondent, a field dominated by men, and she seized the opportunity (“Here I have the chance to write something meaningful, but back home I’ll just be offered the ‘woman’s angle” again”). She has this deeply held THING about her relationship with her father, seriously wanting/wishing to make him proud of her (sadly, he died too soon, shortly after expressing his disappointment in her, and IMHO she never really got over that).

Possibly due to this hole in her life, she is unexpectedly attracted to the older, married Hemingway when she meets in his bar in Key West. It was a bit creepy how he called her “daughter,” but she fell madly in love with him during their time in Spain, and they lived together in Cuba, where she set out working herself to a frazzle to make things perfect so he will choose her over his wife. Here’s where I started having trouble. He story was so interesting, except for the part where he kept telling her he was working on finding a way to be free to marry her and kept stringing her along, and she went along. This part was such a cliché, I really nearly put the book down…

They were both working writers with some success until For Whom the Bell Tolls was published, when he became hugely rich and famous, eclipsing her success. He’s a pig, confirming my prejudiced view of him, and she gets to where she has to make a choice: she can just give in to being only his wife, or she can forge her own path, which won’t end well (“…he would break my heart. I already knew that if nothing else.”) Ugh. As it turned out, she also broke his, but he seemed to bounce back soon enough with the next one.

I kept reading because I really wasn’t sure how things turned out for Martha and I cared about her, even while she was taking forever to get to the place where being her own person, however that was, would be better than living with a man like him. Three stars, and not just because I don’t like Hemingway…there were just too many times where the “romance” was just one icky cliché after another.