When We Let Go by Rochelle Weinstein
When We Let Go (Lake Union Publishing) is a love story for grown-ups, with all the life-stuff grown-ups must deal with — from first loves, shattered hopes and losses to family dynamics and teenaged angst. Rochelle Weinstein is good at telling stories like this.
This is her sixth such novel, although they are not a series — Weinstein introduces new characters in each book. What runs through them all, however, is honest people trying to make the best of things, making mistakes, recovering, apologizing, falling in love and, of course, “letting go.”
In this book, a young woman is hanging on to a life she built after leaving the family farm and a tiny town in North Carolina. She finds comfort in the hedges, flowers and history of an ornate museum and nature preserve in Miami where she works tending the gardens and leading visitor tours. Surrounded by blossoms and sunshine, the man she’s been seeing — and with whom she has tentatively fallen in love — asks her to marry him.
It seems like a fairy tale ending that arrives on page 2, but this is only the start of their story. Avery hesitates, struggling for the right words; Jude assumes she is refusing his proposal, and before anything can be set right, he gets a phone call that tilts everything. There’s an emergency involving Jude’s children.
Nothing is simple or easily fixed. Grown-ups do not come to relationships without baggage. Jude is widowed and the father of two rambunctious sons and a rebellious teenage daughter named Elle. Avery carries a tragedy that she’s lived with for a long time. Estranged from her family, she’s alone and secretive. She carries the tragedy alone. Telling Jude terrifies her. She’s convinced he will not love her once he knows her history, but not telling him is a kind of lie — a lie of omission.
COMPLICATED LIVES AND DETERMINED PEOPLE
When We Let Go balances the emotions of not only Jude and Avery, but their respective families, too. Back in North Carolina, Avery’s sister Willow looks after the farm business and cares for their widower father. Both of them miss Avery and struggle to figure out a way to get her back. Her abandonment grieves them both.
Jude’s children are an uneasy combination of two little boys and one angry, confused teenage girl who is missing her mother and resentful of Avery. And Jude believes that Avery has turned him down; she doesn’t love him. It’s hard to see how all of this can resolve itself. Relationships cannot be successfully built on lies and resentment.
Again, a family emergency trumps everything. Avery’s father has fallen and requires immediate surgery. “You have to come home,” her sister announces.
Here is where the story really begins as Avery confronts her past, Elle wakes up in the backseat of Avery’s car halfway to North Carolina and Jude is left with an uncertain future, a battered heart, a demanding job and two needy sons.
Not a slick little romance, When We Let Go is a worthy read about complicated lives and determined people. And a story about love.
About Rochelle B. Weinstein: