Book Smart Kate

Book: 🌟🌟🌟🌟💫  Audiobook performance: 🌟🌟🌟🌟💫 Spice: 🌶️🌶️

by Melissa Wiesner – Thanks to the author for an advanced reading copy of this powerful story. Below is my honest review.

Jane and Nik were inseparable best friends throughout childhood and planned to attend college together. But Jane has been harboring a dark secret about her family. When everything boils over in a dramatic confrontation with her parents, Jane disappears, leaving Nik with heartbreak and unanswered questions. Ten years later, Jane is caught in old patterns, and with the death of her father, she returns home to help her mother. She’s shocked to run into Nik, who had always wanted to escape their small town. Now a local ER doctor, Nik’s life is upended when the only person he ever loved returns, but he also wants the truth about why she left. As truths are revealed, this heat-wrenching book takes readers down some very unexpected paths.

This is a compelling, heart-breaking and unputdownable book about domestic violence, the patterns parents create for their children and the battles children have to fight to break free from those same patterns. Told in a dual timeline between the present and flashbacks from the last decade, we see the world through Jane and Nik’s POVs as their lives go on wildly different trajectories from what they had planned in high school. The story addresses the complexities of how to extricate yourself from a dangerous relationship – and why some people stay. It also deals with the anxieties of potentially opening yourself up to healthy relationships (both romantic and friendship) and learning to trust again. You may think this sounds like a CoHo book recently made into a movie, and it does have elements of that, but some significant twists make this a unique and uniquely satisfying read.

The audiobook is exceptionally well performed by Kate Handford, who expertly conveys a range of emotional performances.

What is a book you are looking forward to reading?