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Can a perfect love heal even your deepest wounds?
As a helicopter medic, Daniel Bliant saves other people’s lives. He’s cool under pressure, a calm presence for trauma victims on the worst day of their lives. So why can’t he heal himself? When he answers an emergency call at Phil’s Bar, he can’t believe who the bartender is: the beautiful woman he saw in his ER months ago and hasn’t been able to stop thinking about. But even though Annika is intelligent, lively, and gorgeous, he knows he should forget her. He hasn’t worked through his own trauma after the incident that left him shattered, so how can he possibly think about love?
Annika Mehta loves her job as a kindergarten teacher, even if the low pay means she has a side gig tending bar at Phil’s. She may be reeling from a bad breakup and the terrible event that caused it, but she knows she’s resilient. What she doesn’t need is Daniel. He’s wrong for her in every single way, but somehow, she can’t let him go.
This tear-jerker of a romance follows two souls in need of healing—when all roads lead back to each other.
Review:
I have a soft spot for romances that revolve around grief and love’s power to overcome even the worst wounds. Shroff doesn’t hold back in showing the self-destructive ways people grapple with grief. In this way, the romance arc doesn’t start with falling in love, but with growing and giving yourself a chance to release the pain.
I found this story incredibly touching. As a person who has had to deal with sudden, traumatic grief, the depiction is as real as it gets. This is especially true with the SPOILER ALERT storyline about a school shooting, which struck me particularly hard as an educator myself. The story does not trifle with this topic or any of the more serious topics it presents. It demonstrates enormous respect, not only for its characters, but for all aspects of the grieving process, including the parts we cannot do by ourselves. Therapy and professional mental health services are depicted in a refreshingly positive way.
Love cannot in itself be the the cure for catastrophic loss, but is the result of proper healing.
Annika and Daniel’s story was sweet and authentic, and Shroff manages to convey the weight of such topics as racism, grief and maladjustment without miring the story in its own heaviness. This alone is a feat. But I also loved the way their Annika and Daniel’s Indian culture is served up as fact, and the source of love and support that Annika and Daniel receive. There is so much love in this story, it’s impossible not to get lost in it.
Many thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for providing a review copy.
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