First up, I should admit that I'm a long-standing advocate of romance; the world's a harsh enough place without reading/watching things that don't have some form of hopeful uplift or happiness to them. That said, every once in a while I try to read something a little more reality-balanced and it's kind of obvious from the blurb that this book is not about the "HEA", so I dipped a toe into reading with a wary curiosity about what sort of "ever after" it would end with.
Kelly, the narrator, is a woman dealing with terminal illness and a marriage in trouble. We meet her on a beach, near the hotel where she is staying with her husband, Gary, and Gary's personal assistant Debra. The beach is also where she meets Tyler and his dog, Larkin.....no spoilers, but we follow a story which is as much an internal unfolding of the characters as an external narrative of what their days contain.
The only reason I give four and not five stars is because I found the story so emotionally engaging that I can't critique the book in a literary way, only a story-telling way. It's been a while since a book made me cry, but this one somehow just hooked me in and I genuinely couldn't put it down until I'd finished. A day later and I'm still a bit zoned out by the height of the emotional experience and I wanted to demonstrate my support for this writer by just saying how much I enjoyed this book (although "enjoyed" should probably be a much stronger, richer, deeper, emotionally and vibrantly-charged adjective with slighly red-eyed undertones). I haven't reviewed anything for a while on Amazon, but this book just wouldn't let me go without saying thank you to its author.....even if, as in life, I wish things could be different....
