4.5 ⭐️s. Really well written and the story sucked me in. I identified quite a bit with Nora - while not infertile, we struggled to get pregnant and had 2 miscarriages so I get the whole emotional rollercoaster and struggle around other new parents she felt.

I thought the character development was great and there was so much anxiety I felt for Nora during so much of it, making me want to know what was next. The disparity between Nora/Jacob and Evelyn was well done and the tension conveyed perfectly, and while the friendship was a little dysfunctional, it was a great story about grace, generosity and forgiveness.

While there were things in the book I wish went differently, the imperfection of the story felt authentic. Overall I enjoyed this one a lot.

Thanks to Netgalley for the advanced copy of this book. All opinions are mine.

That did not end the way I thought it would. It was good, some pieces were really easy to figure out and some weren’t even tho I didn’t read the first book. Some pieces were a little more violent in nature than I care for but definitely kept my attention

I struggled with this one. On the one hand, I had flashbacks from growing up in charismatic and Pentecostal churches, and in the late 90s/early 2000s, a lot of this is pretty typical of the culture. So it was very familiar and somewhat comfortable.

On the other hand, the culture back then, and in this book, were full of many unrelatable Christian-ese statements and sentiments, as well as dangerous thought processes that all you had to do was pray or have faith and God would take “it” away. Have PTSD? “That’s easy” - It’s just demonic and you can pray for immediate deliverance. Have cancer? Get saved and pray and God will heal you. And there will always be someone to prophetically speak to you when he needs you to know something. And while I’m certainly not saying that was 100% of the time what the book was saying, there was a enough of it that made it frustrating.

In real life, God doesn’t always (or often) take things away when they’re hard or you’re weak or things are bad. His strength makes up for our weakness - but our weakness still remains. That’s the point. Yes, God can heal or deliver or speak thru someone. But quite often, he wants us to struggle thru things so we learn to lean on him rather than constantly have the problem removed and “fixed”.

(And the emotional immaturity and lack of ability to control the characters’ reactions with other ppl so often, and doormat-codependency of the mother were also really annoying)

This was good and was hard to put down. Well written. I didn’t care for Miles’ undeserved loyalty but I get it. The story overall was a good one although I felt like some of the more deeper seated issues with the characters was resolved a little too simply.