This was a heart-warming, heart-wrenching, heart-mending surprise of a novel, stuffed with wit and charm, some naive passion and a mature romance, a mouthful of banter, and all the delectable literary truffles you’d expect from a book with shelves of books on the cover and the word ‘book’ in the title. 

 

Each character is embroiled in colossal real-life mistakes that cause irreversible trauma and life-long damage, and each is presented with a simple impossible question: what will you forgive? 

 

The unpredictable responses from this motley cast of serendipitous friends and lovers confronts our piety, humbles us, and mends us. We are inadvertently asked to evaluate our own quick-to-judge assessments of the people in our lives, and even those on the fringes, and the asking is gentle and kind, the extension of the forgiving hand of the person we’ve hurt the most… 

 

This is not simply a novel, it’s a whole purpose, the divine ambition and momentous objective and subtle intent that should be and can be applied to every novel we read; it’s precisely a novel about how to read a book—as if our lives depended on it… 

 

This will probably be one of my top reads of 2025, and it’s only January…