📖 Book Review ~Love and Other Lost Things by Melissa Wiesner

 

Bookouture
6 August 2024

Thanks to the publisher for my copy of this book

Jane McCaffrey is only back in her hometown of Linden Falls because of her father’s death. She swears she’ll leave again forever—it’s not like her childhood home holds any happy memories. But Jane hadn’t planned on bumping into Nik…

The boy she fell hard for was a skinny teenager with messy hair and his glasses askew. Now he’s broad-shouldered and stands well over six feet tall: but his deep brown eyes are just the same. And when he breathes her name and caresses the fresh bruise on her cheek—like he can’t help but touch her—Jane is thrown right back to the best and worst time of her life.

Jane and Nik once shared everything: kisses, hopes, and teenage dreams. Taking in his blue scrubs and doctor’s ID badge, Jane’s heart lifts that at least one of them got to live their dream. And as they catch up over the beautiful music they once loved, it’s like the years between them fall away.

But Nik doesn’t know the heavy secret Jane carries about the real reason she left town. Or who put that bruise on her cheek… or about her plans to truly disappear, forever.

So when the past comes calling, can Jane and Nik find the strength to fight for each other? Or was Jane dangerously wrong to think she could outrun her secret—and will it destroy them both?

📖 My Review..

Domestic violence is the theme which runs throughout this contemporary story which follows Jane McCaffrey who ran away from her childhood home as a young teenager only go back to Linden Falls some ten years later when her father died. Jane’s return to her childhood home sparks difficult memories especially when she meets again those of her best friends who thought that she had, quite simply, abandoned them. As this complex story unfolds there is a sense of lives coming full circle and with old secrets being revealed now is the time for Jane tell her story to those who were once her closest friends.

This was an intricate look at life in a small American town, a place where everyone knew each other’s business and yet when things were uncomfortable folks tended  to look the other way. The author explores this claustrophobic small town atmosphere really well, and brings the place and the people alive in the imagination. I enjoyed getting to know, Jane and meeting her friends, particularly Nik who is a really special person. Whilst the author does a great job of building up a stark picture of everything in Jane’s life, it is in the promise of the future where the heart of the story lies.

Beautifully written and heart breaking in places, Love and Other Lost Things is a compelling read with a dramatic ending I really didn’t see coming.

About the Author

Melissa Wiesner is a night-owl who began writing novels about five years ago when her early-to-bed family retired for the evening. In 2019, she won the Romance Writers of America Golden Heart® Award in the Mainstream Fiction Category for her first novel. Melissa holds two Master’s Degrees in Public Health and Community Agency Counseling. Her day job is in Social Work where she often encounters people knocked down by hard times but who pick themselves up and keep going, just like the characters of her novels. Melissa lives in Pittsburgh, PA with her charming husband and two adorable children

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