Trouble comes in threes, Grandma CeCe always said…
A baby. Just holding one sets Julia’s heart thumping. She’s wanted a child for so long. When she finally gets pregnant, she’s bursting to tell the world….until a checkup from the doctor confirms a miscarriage.
Julia’s world feels like it’s dissolving. This second tragedy following her father-in-law’s death, shakes her and her husband Greg. To support his mother, they uproot their lives and move to Greg’s childhood home. Under the bright Midwestern sky, Julia can feel a new world and new hope beginning.But trouble comes in threes, and soon a boy shows up at Julia’s new daycare whose blue eyes and freckled face look eerily like Greg’s. Despite her love for her husband, Julia finds her thoughts haunted by the boy’s face, and she can’t shake the feeling that her husband has a secret.
I was in need of a good women's fictional novel and when I heard about this book, I knew that I would want to read it. The book gets straight to the point in a lot of aspects and that was really refreshing to see especially because the topic is so controversial that a lot of writers would skirt around the issue but Amanda Linsmeier respected the issue enough to actually talk about it. This is an excellent debut novel that talks about serious issues in a casual setting.
People from all walks of life go through miscarriage, it isn't something that's relegated to a particular kind of people and Julia and her husband Greg represented the everyday middle-class family and it was nice to see the struggles a married couple goes through every day.
The characters were fun and easy to relate to and just easy to read. The key to tackling big issues is to talk about them in a real setting and Linsmeier did just that. This was a story of a married couple going through an unbelievably hard time. It paid homage to all the couples out there who struggle to have a good marriage and in general just work hard for a good marriage.
The story development was smooth and not rushed. The main thing about this book was that it felt real, and real life comes with messy and gritty emotions and those emotions were present. All in all, it was a very good debut novel and I'm glad that I was part of the book tour and I hope to read more amazing works from Amanda Linsmeier soon.
Rating:- 3 stars
Amanda Linsmeier's work has appeared in Brain, Child Magazine, WOW! Women on Writing, and Portage Magazine. She works part-time at her local library and brings home more books than she has time to read. Amanda lives in the countryside with her husband and children, two dogs, and half-wild cat. Ditch Flowers is her first novel.
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