“What’s this?” Fern asked, her fingers hovering above a long green frond with delicate leaves that now wrapped around the five names. “It’s a fern.” “You got a tattoo…of a fern?” Fern’s lower lip started to tremble again, and if Ambrose wasn’t so touched by her emotion, he would have laughed at her pouty little girl face. “But…it’s permanent,” she whispered, aghast. “Yeah. It is. So are you,” Ambrose said. 

WARNING: there may be some spoilers ahead. It was difficult for me to write this review without talking about some of the deeper, more meaningful things that happened in this story. I apologize in advance.

I had to take a few minutes for myself before I could write this review because I couldn’t stop crying. I’m currently still crying, but I’m able to see my computer screen, so I can write at the same time. This book was…wow. I’m not sure I know how to describe it. It was transcendent, unlike anything I’ve ever read before. My heart was ripped from my chest, I bled out, and then I was healed and made whole again. It takes a very special book to force it’s reader to feel things so fully. 

There is no avoiding the pain and sorrow this book brings, it’s inevitable. To delve into that pain, we first have to discuss the reasoning behind it: loss. How do you navigate loss? Everyone grieves in a different way, so it’s impossible to understand, truly, what our characters are going through. You can only take from what you’ve experienced in this life. I’m not sure if this is a spoiler, but we lose Bailey in this book. In a horrific way that leaves you hunched over, gasping for breath while you wail. At least, that’s how it left me. I knew it was coming, like I said before, it was inevitable, but it’s the way that it happens that gets you. I won’t go into detail on that, but just know that you should be prepared, if you read this, for the pain of that loss. To me, he was the biggest loss of all. We also lose Paulie, Grant, Jesse, and Beans, Ambrose’s four best friends from high school. All five of them head off to war and only Ambrose returns. He suffers from PTSD, survivor’s guilt, and half of his face is completely deformed. So yes, that’s another loss. Ambrose’s beauty. Fern loses her old insecurities as she becomes a beautiful, strong woman. There is a lot that’s lost in this novel, but there is also so much joy and happiness.

“There isn’t heartache if there hasn’t been joy. I wouldn’t feel loss if there hadn’t been love.”

I’m new to Amy Harmon’s work but this book was recommended to me on Amazon, so I thought I’d give it a shot. Amy gives us little vignettes (throughout our story) of flashbacks. We get everything from Ambrose’s time overseas with his friends, to Bailey and Fern’s time growing up together. We get to see them all go to senior prom and we get to watch Fern have her first kiss. We even have a glimpse of what life was like for Ambrose when he was in the hospital after the accident. There’s so much that our author gifts to us in these tiny scenes. They are blended so well through the story that everything flows perfectly. Jumping back and forth between the past and the present can sometimes feel like a chore for the reader, but here it is done so eloquently, it makes it easy for us. Beautiful work.

The last thing I want to discuss is the biggest topic amongst the romance community: sex. There’s none of it in this book. Absolutely none. There is passion and chemistry and plenty of kissing, but no sex. And you know what? I didn’t miss it. That is a RARE thing for me to say, let me tell ya. But for some reason, it never even crossed my mind while I was reading the book. Only at the very end, when our author glosses over the fact that our leads are making love, did the idea rear its head. I can’t even begin to explain what this means. I think it’s pretty clear that if a romance novel didn’t need sex to make it exceptional, the author must really be talented. This story was magical and complex and painful, but so uplifting and inspiring. I could read this over and over again and never get tired of it. I hope I can meet Amy Harmon one day and thank her for writing such a magnificent story. 5 stars!

“Everybody is a main character to someone.”