Review: Falling Embers
Rating: 5/5
Series: Tattered and Torn Book #2
Tropes: best-girl-friend, book-boy-friends, brother-s-best-friend, co-workers, emotional-trauma, first-responder-mc, friends-to-lovers, protector, second-chance, siblings-best-friend, single-dad, small-town-romance-bar, sports, suspense
PoP: 48%
The more books I read by the author the larger my girl crush on her becomes. The crafting and storytelling that Catherine Cowles does is simply phenomenal. Her characters are ones that leave an imprint on your soul. You are always better after having read one of her stories.
Falling Embers was a story with such heart and love to it. The moving parts of this story created an intense story that ended with light and love.
Hadley is the youngest child in her family. She has a natural wildness about her. She has lived in the shadow of her older sister’s kidnapping. She has been forced for a lifetime to be safe and cautious, all of which goes against her nature. Hadley’s mother has used her disappointment and guilt to force Hadley to hide who she truly is.
An unlikely connection to Calder her older brother’s best friend show Hadley the possibilities of how to “Fly”. She flies from the boundaries of her mother’s oversight to find joy in her world. Her joy comes at pushing past the norm and taking chances in the form of extreme sports. Hadley find true joy in skateboarding, mountains biking stunts, and cliff diving. Pushing bast what is safe to the extreme.
Calder’s finds joy in those moments of discovery with Hadley. As he helps her learn to fly life and time move forward pushing these two friends apart. Life takes them on different course. Calder is now a single dad of twin daughters Birdie and Sage.
The Heartache of this story for both characters was tangible. You could feel Hadley’s joy in her moments of freedom but also the weight of trying to be what her family needs her to be. The disappointment she feels when she does not measure up to the expectations of her mother. He hearts is drawn to Calder and his little girls, but she feels like to follow that she must change.
There is someone lurking who has the power to destroy everything in Hadley’s world. Everything she has been fighting for might be lost it this person gets their way.
The story of Calder and Hadley is graceful and poetic. It has a smoldering embers that embed themselves into your heart leaving you desperate to finish the story. The strength of this story is the characters as the navigate their way to an HEA. They will become a part of your fabric. These are characters that will stay with you for a long time after The End. The author has a way of weaving her story that you are given small bits here and there as to where the story might end but often in the end you are left slightly stunned with the unexpected. The elegance of this story is in that two people who at the beginning seem like an unlikely fit end up in the end being the ideal fit. Never have two people been more meant to be than Hadley and Calder.
