Penny and Colton have been best friends and loved each other for as long as they could remember. When Penny leaves town to go to college they try to stay in touch, but as often happens, things change. When Penny doesn’t hear from Colton, her mother tells Penny he’s found someone else. It’s not until Penny ends up back home in Alabama that Penny finds out her mother lied and realizes the depths of her mother’s insidious deception. Colton didn’t find someone else five years ago. He was in a devastating accident and lost all memories from before the accident, including his lifetime with Penny. Due to more lies on her mother’s part, no one ever told Penny about the accident. Now Colton doesn’t know who she is, and this Colton since the accident is a very different man than the boy Penny still loves.
Truly, I should hate this author after reading this book. She tore open my chest, ripped out my heart and replaced it with a ten ton weight, while running a herd of elephants over my raw, bleeding heart a few thousand times. It’s full of angst, pain, tragedy and lost chances, with a seed of hope sprouting up only to be torn away and destroyed by the characters’ stormy turmoil leaving a new devastation in its wake. But when you read about Penny loving Colton since they were five years old when he first pulled her hair and she tells him, “A love that deep can never heal. You’ve scarred me for life…My heart and soul belong to you. Only you,” you can’t help having that seed of hope sprouting anew because you just know to the depths of your soul they’re destined for each other and it HAS to work out. Of course it works out, but in such a beautiful, moving way, even going as far as to redeem the most evil character in the book, Penny’s mother. And just when I finally had myself back together with Colton and Penny’s happily ever after (which I thought would NEVER happen), you tear me up one last time with the sweet scene between Buddy and Lilly in the bonus epilogue.
These characters will immediately be a part of your heart and you’ll experience every scene and emotion to the farthest reaches of your soul. There is so much depth, drama and passion in this book that, not only will it be impossible to put down, but days later you’ll still feel the weight of the journey and the epic, abiding, forever love between these two. Colton is complex and so damaged, yet still loveable, although at times I really wanted to shake him. Fortunately, there were some secondary characters to do that for me. Penny is the true hero of the book, although she was still human and made some mistakes. But the way she held on to her love of Colton is a beautiful, important lesson that if something really matters, it’s worth holding on to and fighting for with every fiber of our being. I can only hope that I would be as brave and determined as Penny, if faced with something similar.
This is not a light, easy read. Your emotions will be yanked, tugged, shoved, squeezed and wrung out, but you’ll finish the book with an overflowing heart, a different outlook on love, and that big, satisfied sigh that an exceptional work elicits. The premise alone is fascinating, but the way the story is constructed and the tapestry is woven with the thread of words, the color of thoughts and the texture of feelings is achingly, hauntingly beautiful. Colton and Penny’s story is a love for the ages – realistic and heartbreaking yet magnificent, passionate, breathtaking and awe-inspiring, and the kind of deep, abiding love we all hope and dream of. This is a book that will stay in your heart long after you move on to your next book and you’ll want to read again and again. It will leave you pondering, thinking, and maybe seeing things a little differently. Run, don’t walk, to the one-click button. You absolutely don’t want to miss this one!