Review: “Lap Baby”
This is my fourth book by this author, and in each case she has reached out directly. You can find her other books here:
The Premise
In the aftermath of an unspeakable tragedy, three women who survived it are still shattered in many ways 20 years later. The youngest, Paige, is now a young woman who stumbles into a relationship with her first love. Can she find a way to escape her past? Homemaker, wife, and mother Marie has never recovered from her loss and grief — is it too late to save her marriage? And finally there’s Julie, a divorced flight attendant who is still fighting to make a difference decades later — a losing mission, but her only way to channel her own grief and guilt over what took place that day. Can these woman each find a way to not only survive, but also thrive in their lives and forgive the past?
The Pros & Cons
This was another amazing read by an author who blew me away with her last novel. Here again, she deals with crippling grief and a tragedy that has forever marked the lives of these women. Each story occurs in the same timeline but almost entirely separately, with very little crossover at the beginning, and then we dive into their individual stories before it culminates in their reunion at the end.
For each woman, living and loving is a challenge. From the divorced Julie who ruined her own relationship after the tragedy she survived, and isn’t sure she can open herself to love again; to the still-married Marie who ignores her husband and family’s needs to wallow in her own grief; to the young and naive Paige who isn’t sure what love is as yet — love at different stages of life is depicted with an honest, raw intensity that keeps you feverishly turning the pages to see how their stories will turn out.
As with all of this author’s books thus far, I came away with an overwhelming sensation of having learnt something. In this case, it’s that regardless of what took place in the past, it’s never too late to heal. It took these characters decades to reach to that point of truly overcoming the past and forging a new way forward, and the wait was worth the while and hugely satisfying.
As it is a five-star-read I struggle to find any hiccups here, but I do remember there was a moment very near the end where a sprinkling of a “steamy” moment for one of the characters seemed unnecessary — though I’m positive many readers would have loved it, LOL! I absolutely loved all the earlier steamy bits that sprung up though — the author writes these very well with such tastefulness and care; it’s just that for me at that stage of the book with just a few pages left to devour, it felt like a bit much. Also, honestly, there is so much here to love in this novel that even as a clean romance, everything would’ve still worked beautifully. Each woman’s story is a fantastic story in its own right, and it only gets better when everything ties together in the end!
Conclusion
This was another well-crafted novel that explores a shocking, rare tragedy and it reverberations decades later, and yet there is so much levity and sweetness at the same time that it makes your heart soar. Again I must mention my favourite thing about this author is that there are no tropes here; no cookie-cutter story whatsoever. Each story of hers is entirely different, so you never know what to expect, and this was another great surprise that wowed me. I absolutely loved it, and look forward to the next one!
