Book Review: A New Life by L J Ambrosio

Review

A New Life by L.J. Ambrosio is the third book in the Reflections of Michael Trilogy. It is one of those deep, philosophical books that doesn’t merely tell a story, it makes you to pause and listen. It’s a meditation on grief, friendship, memory, and the philosophical pursuit of freedom, wrapped in the intimate bond between two men, Ron and Louie, as they go through life in Paris after profound personal losses.

At its core, this novel isn’t plot-driven; it’s character-driven, emotion-led, and deeply poetic. Author Ambrosio invites us into the world of Shakespeare and Company as a sanctuary, a home for the broken and the brilliant. Through rich, dialogue-heavy scenes and introspective monologues, we witness Louie and Ron as they rebuild their lives and identities in the wake of death, trauma, and exile.

What I found particularly compelling is Ambrosio’s ability to layer personal grief with historical and literary subtexts. Through references to St. John of the Cross, Virginia Woolf, Hart Crane, and Sylvia Beach, the novel situates its characters within the lineage of great thinkers, artists, and seekers, many of whom were outcasts in their own time. This intertextual depth lends the book a haunting resonance, reminding us how art often emerges from profound solitude.

Louie, who is at once fragile and radiant, feels like a character born out of longing. His bond with Ron is tender, real, and beautifully undefined; it resists the binaries of friendship and romance, instead embracing something more nuanced: chosen kinship. Other secondary characters add their own textures to Louie’s emotional backdrop, shaping his growth and reminding us that human connection is always political and spiritual.

This book isn’t for readers who crave fast pacing or traditional plot arcs. It’s for those who enjoy wandering thoughts, philosophical digressions, and the meditative rhythm of characters sitting in cafés talking about art, grief, and the unknowable future. It’s a novel that asks you to slow down and feel rather than simply read.

There are moments where the prose becomes slightly repetitive or self-referential, but even that feels intentional, as if echoing the loops of memory and grief the characters are caught in. And there’s something profoundly healing in that.

Overall, this is a book about remembering, and in remembering, beginning again. Author Ambrosio gives us a novel of resistance; the resistance of the artist, the queer body, the intellectual, and the survivor. And in doing so, he leaves us not with answers, but with a space to contemplate our own “new life,” whatever that may mean.

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