*This review can also be found on my Goodreads account.
Hope. Relationships. Courage.
These themes are at the core of this feel good novel. Hope in the present and hope in the future played a large part in each woman's reaction and approach to various situations going on in her life. Relationships played an active role in each woman's life as well, whether it be a start of a new relationship, recapturing a lost desire for the person one was with, or establishing new bonds with a family member where those bonds seemed impossible before. And courage arose in each woman to take the chances necessary to achieve the happiness they each desired in different ways.
This book follows the lives of four different women from different backgrounds and ages. The only character I truly connected with was Alix and she turned out to be the one that bound the others together in friendship. None of the characters were perfect and they each made a lot of mistakes along the way, but then that's life. No one gets it perfect the first time around!
The reason I couldn't rate this book any higher was I felt like the development of the characters was lacking and the development of their bond of friendship almost non-existent. It went from them being strangers to great friends in a matter of a couple of months, but none of the interactions between the four women gave any indication they were becoming more than acquaintances.
I also didn't like the fact that each woman's predicament and subsequent solution was all too familiar and predictable. The author dropped such a healthy (unhealthy?) dose of foreshadowing for each character, that I was able to pretty much see what was going to happen long before it happened. And I found that disappointing and boring. Not much originality in the individual story lines at all.
This is a feel good book with happy endings all around. So if you're looking for that type of novel to curl up with on a cold winter's night or a sunny day at the beach, then definitely give this book a try. But if you're looking for more complex characters and situations, writing that has a lot of layers, then this might not be the right kind of book for you.
I probably won't continue this series as I feel like it was enough of an ending for me. I'm not interested enough to know what happens next for any of them and just prefer to assume they all live happily ever after.
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