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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:

Rochelle B. Weinstein is the USA Today and Amazon bestselling author of emotionally driven women’s fiction, including This Is Not How It EndsSomebody’s DaughterWhere We FallThe Mourning After and What We Leave Behind. Rochelle spent her early years, always with a book in hand, raised by the likes of Sidney Sheldon and Judy Blume. A former entertainment industry executive, she splits her time between sunny South Florida and the mountains of North Carolina. When she’s not writing, Rochelle can be found hiking, reading and searching for the world’s best nachos. She is currently working on her seventh novel. Please visit her at www.rochelleweinstein.com.

When We Let Go by Rochelle Weinstein
Author: Rochelle Weinstein
Sherri Daley

Sherri Daley has been writing freelance for national and regional publications for many years, including MORE magazine, Car and Driver, and the New York Times. She is the author of a book about commodities traders and a ghostwriter for business motivational texts. As a freelancer, she has established herself as someone who will write about anything – from cancer treatments to the lives of Broadway stagehands to that new car smell, blueberry jam, and Joshua Bell’s violin. Her curiosity drives her to read about anything, too, and she’s eager to share what she likes with others. She says life’s too short to read a bad book. When she’s not reading, she’s tending her gardens in Connecticut where she lives with her cat and a cage of zebra finches, although she’d rather be living in Iceland. Visit her blog at sherridaley.com for more!

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