The Way Home
The Chasing series, book 3
by Linda
Oaks
About
the Book:
“Not
everyone you love is going to leave you…but what if they do?"
For Nate Lucas, this was his reality.
When
he lost her, he was left with no choice. Life was impossible in Crawley without
her. He couldn’t live with all of the memories or her ghost.
He
vowed to never return again.
It was business that brought him back and the chance to right a wrong, but then she needed him; his best friend’s little sister. Her life and her child’s were in danger. It was an arrangement until it became more.
He vowed to never love again; to never allow the past a chance to repeat itself, but sometimes you’re left with no choice.
When the walls around your heart are finally breached, do you run and save yourself or stay and fight for the chance to love again?
When you lose your way, how do you find the way home?
The
Review:
Nate Lucas
lost the love of his young life when he was 18 years-old. We know this story,
we’ve read (in Chasing Rainbows) how deeply that death affected the other
people who loved her – Natalie Hayes. But for Nate, the pain wasn’t simply
about her death; for him, the body blow came from more than just losing her,
with her he’d lost his future. Or at least the future he’d seen for himself,
for them, the only future he believed he could have. To survive, to go on, he
had to leave. He had to keep himself separate, wall himself off and stay away.
But alone
is no way to live, and living the way he did through all the years since her
death was merely existing. To heal, to really live again would take more.
Despite her
more affluent background, Miley Triton’s life had not been some beautiful bed
of roses. The thing about roses after all, is that they have thorns. For Miley
those thorns came in a number of shapes and sizes. Together they shaped her
life, changed its course and colored her view of everything around her. Not to
mention the way it altered her view of herself.
Alone,
except for her young daughter, was how she’d come to like life. Well liking it was probably pushing the
definition of the word, but to Miley if you were alone, you may be lonely
sometimes, but you wouldn’t be hurt by others.
When I
first started reading The Way Home I realized that to a
certain degree we (the readers) knew Nate’s back story. Or if we didn’t know it we could understand it to a
point. The more I read, the more back story I discovered – not just Nate’s loss
of Natalie but of everything that he’d lost as a youth – the more his damage,
for lack of a better word, became apparent. I think it’s safe to say that at
one I point I actually wondered whether there would or could be redemption for him. Whether he would ever be willing to
take hold of something more for himself: something that would make him want to
really live again.
In a very
big way that’s what The Way Home is about – that finding something that makes you
want to truly live again when you’ve determined or resigned yourself to being
alone. “Home is where the heart is”, that’s what they say, right? But home isn’t
just a house, it’s people too. It’s community. It’s caring.
Some people
need the big picture to really see it, others just need one facet, one heart,
to know it’s there.
For a lot
of reasons, I connected with this story on a deeply personal level. Watching
Nate and Miley struggle to find stable footing with one another, while at the
same time allowing themselves to re-evaluate their views of themselves and the
course they wanted their lives to take, it hit very close to my heart. I can’t
deny that there were a few times I wanted to curse Nate for his bullish,
blatant assholery (and I don’t care whether that’s a real word or not!). On the
flipside, there were a couple times I wanted to shake Miley for her own
snapshot, retaliatory behavior. Despite
those moments though, I found myself rooting for them. Not even that they would
end up together but that, together or apart, they would end up better off then
they began. And… well, they did. Which for me, was actually the perfect course
forward for their lives.
I truly
loved The Way Home. I had no idea when I started how the story would
touch me, personally, or how important the resolution would be to me. Yet I know
that even without those factors, the personal correlations I mean, I still
would love the story: the characters’ struggles through personal hells, the
connection and feeling that grows between them, the gathering faith and
strength that they bring to one another… But for the painful course their lives
had already taken, Nate and Miley would never have come together as they did in
The
Way Home, there would have been no need. Isn’t it strange and somehow
wonderful that even amidst the darkest parts of life, one single point of light
can lead you home?
Are you
intrigued? Interested?
Get a copy of The Way Home today and discover
whether Nate and Miley’s story will touch your heart as it has touched mine.
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