I have loved books by this author in the past, she has a talent for incorporating real-life events with strong emotions. I was thoroughly immersed in The Way it Should Be and More Than We Remember . This latest offering is another heart-tugging story of family.
I voluntarily reviewed a complimentary copy of this book. All opinions are my own. This post contains affiliate links, see disclosures for more detail.
About the Book:
Cassie George is barely staying above water as she works to get her doctorate and raise her daughter. But she stubbornly keeps swimming to prove a few bad decisions haven’t ruined her forever. Plus, it’s all a great excuse to stay away from the small Oregon town she fled in shame years prior. But when she receives a call that the aunt who raised her has had a major health crisis, she knows it’s time to return.
Cassie is surprised to be more welcomed by the quirky seaside community than she expected, even if there’s still tension between her and her former classmate Nora Milford. But she still can’t help feeling unsettled and is mystified by a mysterious package that appears, full of typed pages that tell the story of an anonymous woman’s life. As her curiosity sends her on a journey toward truth, Cassie will discover that who she thought she was and what she wants for her life are both about to change.
My Thoughts:
I gave this book 3 stars.
Christina Nelson knows how to write an emotion-tugging book!
At first, I wasn’t sure I was going to enjoy a book about a woman coming home to care for her aging aunt suffering from Parkinson’s. It did take me a while to warm up to the main character Cassie, and I’m not entirely sure that I fully succeeded even in the end. She’s quite stubborn and resistant to help from anyone, despite her exhaustion and being overwhelmed. She has an adorable young daughter Lark, who is precocious and added a great deal of comic relief along the way.
I think what made this book more compelling was the mystery surrounding Cassie’s past. She receives a mysterious story and as she reads it, she starts to think that it might be about her. I was fully invested in the tale to find out how the story tied into Cassie’s life. I’m not sure I completely bought the way everything came together in the conclusion and I had to read through it a couple of times to puzzle out the connections. I think my main problem was that there is a side storyline of another woman in town learning things about her own past, and for whatever reason I thought the two stories were going to end up being connected and they weren’t. I kept trying to connect them the entire time and that’s why I got so confused.
The two other things that elevate this novel are the emotional impact and the setting. The Oregon coast is my stomping grounds, and everything about the descriptions of the small town and the coastline were familiar and vivid. As Cassie grows to understand that her aunt’s time is short, she has to come to terms with losing the woman who has functioned as her mother for most of her life. This is heart wrenching and the emotions are so real, I definitely shed some tears. I wished I had been able to know Aunt Shasta as part of the story, before she developed her illness, so I could have made a connection with her. As it was, we just get Cassie’s point of view about their relationship and it lacks some depth.
Overall this is a very worthwhile read from a fantastic writer.
