Oh, My Shattered Heart

Last night I finished reading the sixth installment in Cassia Leo's Shattered Hearts series, Chasing Abby.  WoW...just, WoW!  This book seriously took me on a huge emotional journey and that doesn't happen often.  There aren't too many books that make me cry.  Honestly.  I can only think of one other right now off the top of my head and that is The Notebook by Nicholas Sparks (and if you deny that you cried too, you're a big fat hairy liar!).  

First, when I began reading this I was really disappointed in the fact that Miss Leo suddenly aged two of my favorite characters almost a decade and I was really having a hard time getting over that.  I just felt like it was wrong, especially since as a reader, I just got to know them and fall in love with them.  I put my displeasure aside, however, for the sake of hearing Abby's story.

Abby was adopted as a baby.  She has also lived her whole life being protected and sheltered due to a heart condition she's had since birth.  She finds out on her 18th birthday who her birth parents are  and this sets forth a journey she would've never imagined.

Enter Claire & Chris Knight, waiting anxiously, patiently, and prayerfully for 18 years to meet their first born child.  When Abby walks through their front door, they feel like their lives are finally complete; they are going to have the best summer ever.  Nothing ever goes quite as planned though.

It starts out as a summer of discovering her other family, discovering more about herself, and discovering true love for Abby, but what happens will break your heart and leave you aching for Abby.  It will leave you wanting to take all the hurt away from the young girl who has already gone through so much in her short 18 years. No joke, grab the tissues, people because it's a doozy!

As I said, I wasn't so thrilled with the direction this book started out in, with Claire and Chris already aged so much but Leo kept their characters very much in line with what you might expect them to be like more than a decade later.  They maintained their friskiness but it was a more mature version of them. Leo did a great job!  Again, I was proven wrong...and I'm happy for that.  I'd rather be proven wrong a million times than end up disappointed with a book I'm reading.

I'm not sure where the author is planning on taking this series from here of if this is how it ends, but it was a good ride.  She did shatter my heart in this latest book, but I'm grateful for happy endings.