***ARC Provided by the Author and The Next Step PR***
I am not sure what I was expecting from this book, but I am positive I got so much more than I ever thought possible. There are books that an author writes that are their best. Jace and Hannah's story is, hands down, the best thing I have read by Kim Karr. Her other books are great, and i have enjoyed them all, but this is her best.
There was just something about this story, about Jace, Hannah, Scarlett and Jonah (and I am never going to be able to put it into words) that strikes that perfect emotional balance of the push of the new love, that isn't totally new, and the pull of the past, of what is comfortable and the struggle we all have in deciding how to honor the things in the past while moving forward and taking the things that are before us in our future.
That is a big part of what Jace struggles with. To go back to your first love, after losing a wife you genuinely loved, is it a betrayal? Does it cheapen the first love, the relationship with his late wife, or does it do neither of those things, because you can't redo the past. The fact that this is his challenge, that this is what he deals with, is in the blurb...but how he deals with it, and how emotionally it is written, well, that is something you have to read the book to experience.
You feel for Jace, you know how badly he wants to move on past his wife's death and how much he struggles with the idea that he wants to move on with his first love, Hannah. There are some beautiful scenes, including one with his closest friend, that really let you in to Jace, and to how he feels, and his struggle. The depth of the friendship that is revealed is amazing, and it is the moment where you really start to believe, as a reader, that Jace is going to start to understand that just because something is in the past doesn't mean it can't be in the future.
When Jace realizes that the past is in the past, and that everything that has happened to us previously leads us to where we are now, and that none of that cheapens the other things that have happened, it's beautiful, it made me teary, and as the blurb says, it had to happen for him and Hannah to have a chance.
The writing in this book is absolutely flawless. The balance of the past and the present, the flashbacks that let you get to know Jace and Hannah, and the present that allows you get to know the people they were, and the people they are now...and to see that they really are different. Both have had experiences that have challenged them, and have changed them.
There is, literally, nothing I would change about this book.