It's Love We Don't Understand Book

Built around three simple but emotionally charged scenes, It's Love We Don't Understand looks at a broken family through th eyes of a 15-year-old girl. The first of the three stories plunges straight into a fierce family quarrel. The storyteller, her sister Edie, her brother Axel, and her mother — with her latest boyfriend — are driving in a very hot car. When Axel suddenly stops the car and expels the boyfriend, a violent fight erupts. In the next story the family comes into Grandma's inheritance, which includes a dog and an old man confined to a wheelchair. In the final story, the sisters grieve the loss of Axel, who has fled from home to live in Charlestown with a friend. The narrator carries on imaginary conversations with Axel in which she expresses her sadness. Bart Moeyaert delicately and skillfully traces the subtle thread of love as it winds through a young girl's life, shaping her character and her destiny.

In three episodic scenes of their family life, a fifteen-year-old girl describes the troubled interrelationships, alternating between love and hate, between herself and her siblings and their self-absorbed, neglectful, and often absent mother.