Two sisters, one heartbreaking promise…
To everyone who knows them, Louisa and Tom are the perfect couple. They have two beautiful kids, Stan and Flo, and are about to celebrate ten years of being happily married. Life is perfect. But when Lou is dealt devastating news, that perfect life is turned upside down and Lou and Tom must reevaluate the very foundations their marriage is built on.
Lou’s main concern is who will look after her children if she’s not there to care for them? Will anyone be able to love them like she does?
Holly can’t face the news that Lou is sick. As her older twin sister, she and Lou have always been together, and Holly has always tried to protect Lou. So she’ll do anything, promise anything, to make Lou feel safe and happy. Holly loves Stan and Flo fiercely, but with no children of her own can she ever be the mother her sister wants and needs for her children?
Determined to make the most of every last precious moment, Lou’s final wish for her family is to show them what it really means to live and love. And as Tom and Holly try to navigate their own pain, their only care is to shower Flo and Stan with love and help them make the most of every moment together.
Purchase Link: https://mybook.to/MothersLastWish
This was probably the hardest book to get through that I have ever read. Written as a fiction novel about a mother’s last moments with her family following a terminal diagnosis, but unfortunately, this fictional world is all too real for so many.
I lost a friend to cancer less than a year ago, and maybe it was too soon to dive into such a painful read, but in a way, it was therapeutic, too. There are so many things that are hard to make sense of when you watch a loved one go through the hardest struggle of a lifetime. Through this book and the voices of main character Louisa, her husband Tom, and her twin sister Holly, I found a way to better understand my friend’s last days in a way I wasn’t able to when she was here experiencing them. I found myself inside her head and her heart through the perspectives of the very authentic and honest characters of this heartbreaking story. That healing was a gift I didn’t anticipate being given when choosing to review this book.
This story of love and loss also gave me a place to channel my own grief. As a mother myself, it always felt unbearable to even think for a second about what it would be like to have to say goodbye to my children. That experience was depicted in such a raw and honest way yet gentle and eloquent through the pages of this book. I related to the characters in such a real way that I felt their heartache, and I cried heavily with each turn of the page. I finally feel like the emotions I previously didn’t allow myself to feel or the fears I didn’t allow myself to navigate were given a voice and I was able to process things as I hadn’t been able to before.
To say this book will forever hold a place in my heart is an understatement. A book like this isn’t meant to be tossed on a shelf and forgotten about. A book like this is meant to touch lives, to change them for the better, to open old wounds and allow them to heal, to give a community to those who might be experiencing something alone.
Thank you for allowing me to be a part of this virtual book tour, Rachel’s Random Resources
Jo Bartlett is the bestselling author of over nineteen women’s fiction titles. She fits her writing in between her two day jobs as an educational consultant and university lecturer and lives with her family and three dogs on the Kent coast. Her first title for Boldwood is The Cornish Midwife – part of a twelve-book deal.
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