It isn’t often that I am so stunned by a book that I have trouble writing a review to honestly convey what I am feeling. It isn’t often that I find a story that makes me feel everything that characters know to be true from the top of their heads to the bottom of their feet. This story of love, profound loss and unexplainable hatred moved me to anguished tears, soul deep grief and just a heartbreak that took my breath away.

How do you comprehend a pain that so engulfs your very soul that the will to go on is simply impossible to embrace? When everything is dark and the world that you knew ends with the flat line of a heart monitor? How do you face the emptiness and hysteria right on the edge of your vision?

Christian and Ava had everything and the family, the we, the us that they were ended when Henry slips away. In a time when these two should have turned to each other, they lost each other. Grief was a terrible living breathing entity destroying a marriage and leaving behind two souls absolutely ravaged in its aftermath. Two people who were the best of friends, best of lovers, best of everything, find themselves separated and on opposite sides of the world. Christian returns to what he knows to find solace – the sea and his journals. Ava remains attached to what she knows to cope with her losses – the bottle. Lots of them. But separated by thousands of miles and a hurt as wide as the ocean, these two are bound together. They try to find each other and themselves in their words, emails and letters. But is it to late to recapture what has been lost?

This story is hauntingly beautiful. It is an emotional roller coaster that on more than one occasion I found I had to get off of, only to find myself riding once again. I felt Christian frustration, loneliness and humiliation, needing his wife but being unable to reach her. No father, no husband should lose everything in one day. As a mother I felt Ava’s unbearable pain at having to bury the child that she bore and then losing herself in the spiral of facing her grief. Her anger was real, her hatred a constant companion. I understood it and just like Ava, I embraced it. No mother should feel this. No wife should feel what she felt.

I’m still speechless and grasping for words to explain how much this book made me feel. What I am still feeling. This book left me reeling, tearful, and anxious for more Ava and Christian. More of their story… more of their chance at healing. Incredible read and without a doubt one of 2017’s finest books. Absolutely incredible, Jasinda. So well done! All the stars!