Friday, May 22, 2015

REVIEW The Day of The Wave

The Day Of The Wave by Becky Wicks 
 
Publication date: May 1st 2015
Genres: Adult, Romance
 

Synopsis:
Isla and Ben were just sixteen when the Boxing Day tsunami tore through their beach resort in Thailand. Just days after forming a life-changing bond, both were missing and presumed dead. Unbeknown to each other and haunted by one of the biggest natural disasters in world history, Isla and Ben are living very different lives, until over a decade later when a chance encounter throws them back together.

Based on real life events, The Day of the Wave is a story of healing, learning to let go, and figuring out when to hold on with everything you have left.
 
Purchase your copy of THE DAY OF THE WAVE onAmazon
 
 
AUTHOR BIO:
 
Becky Wicks lives in Bali and scribbles books, and she’s mostly powered by coffee. Her first book in the Starstruck Series, Before He Was Famous recently reached #1 in Amazon’s Coming of Age and New Adult & College categories, and her three travel books, published by HarperCollins are online to make feet nice and itchy. Mostly though, she loves to write love stories. She blogs most days at beckywicks.com and always welcomes distractions on Twitter @bex_wicks. Especially if you have photos of cats.
 
Author links:
 
 
REVIEW
 
What do you do when everything you know, everyone you hold near and dear to your heart, and (what seems like) the whole world is turned upside down, torn apart?  How do you cope when you’re left scrambling with shreds of the life you had? How does the tragedy change you?
For Isla and Ben, these questions – hypothetical’s that humans occasionally ponder as they consider their place in the world and the meaning of their lives – became the only thoughts in their minds after the tsunami swept through Thailand on December 26, 2004.  They both lost. Period, straight up, no prettying-it-up... They lost.  They lost family. They lost faith. They lost friends. They lost each other.
And then life went on.
More than ten years later they randomly run into each other and it all, the memories, pain, everything, it all comes back.  This time they each need to face what happened then in order to be able to move forward happily with their lives; and it helps that they can face the troubles and terrors of that horrible day together.  Toss in exes, new/old friends, well meaning strangers, a backpacking thief, and a wise-eyed elephant and you’ve got The Day of the Wave.
I was apprehensive about reading Amie Stuart’s new novel.  I just couldn’t decide whether reading this story was something that I would be able to push through.  I’d pick it up and think to myself “today is the day!” and then nothing.  Until one day I finally buckled down, told myself I had to do it.  I’ve read books that I’ve disliked before.  I’ve forced myself to read all the way through books that within a few chapters of starting, I knew I was going not going to like at all.  I was nervous that Day of the Wave was going to end up being one of them.
But then Isla’s pain and her fear caught at my heart and it didn’t take long for me to realize that Ben used his work and even his optimistic attitude to mask his lingering fear and guilt.  More than a decade after the tsunami they both struggled and fought (each in their own ways) to survive.  And as I read I realized that that – the struggle, the pain, the hope and desire for life, was the point. The story was about what they lost, it was about what they had to do to survive.  In the end, they story was about that and so much more – because in the end Isla and Ben don’t just survive, they live.
I don’t know that I can say that I love this book.  Saying that doesn’t really explain how I feel, perhaps a better way of describing it would be that the story touched my heart.  Yes.  It touched my heart – because you don’t have to have lived through a tsunami or other natural disaster to understand the kind of loss that shatters you to a degree that you don’t know whether you can survive it, or whether you even want to.  So yes, The Day of the Wave touched me and I recommend you read it, so that it can touch you as well.

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