Author: Emilie Richards
Book Name: Wedding Ring
Series: Shenandoah Album
Order: #1
Genre: Romance
Rating: Excellent
Blurb:
Needing time to contemplate her troubled marriage, Tessa MacRae agrees to spend the summer helping her mother and grandmother clean out the family home in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley. But the three women have never been close. Helen, the family matriarch, is domineering and sharp-tongued. Nancy, Tessa’s mother, appears to be little more than a social climber. And Tessa herself is in turmoil following a family tragedy that has affected them all.
Now, with the gift of time, Tessa’s eyes are opened, and she begins to see her mother and grandmother for the flawed but courageous women they are. As she restores a vintage wedding ring quilt pieced by her grandmother and quilted by her mother, the secrets that have shadowed their lives unfold at last. And each woman discovers that sometimes you have to clean house to find the things you thought were lost forever.
Review: Powerfully emotional and beautiful, this is a poignant reminder that love isn’t always perfect, just like the people that experience it aren’t.
Every single character is richly layered in their imperfections and history and their struggles with the relationships in their life. This is a story about families and the difficulties in loving those in your family, seeing them all the way to the inside and the truth of who they are and learning to love the whole of them, not just the parts.
This tugged hard and deep on the emotional strings throughout the entire book. Smiles and tears and smiling through tears, it just sticks you in a place that is sometimes hard to get to. It is the kind of book that kind of forces you to examine your own relationships in a new light.
Truly an awesome one.
TJ Fox: Sharing the Experience 