The Wake Up by Catherine Ryan Hyde

While the end of the year approaches, a day away in the part of the world that I write this,and I am plodding away with my own list of 2017 ( To come next, hopefully by tonight) I did not imagine I would end the year with a good enough book to make the cut.

That, however, is just what happened.My kindle popped up with an advert that the new Catherine Ryan Hyde was out on Kindle unlimited. I jumped at the chance, pushed it up my queue of to read books and completed it yesterday in bits ( due to the lack of time and nothing else). This book brought home why I started gorging on her books in the first place. Unlike a few others that I have read, this book does not have a lead character with a mental or social deficit. On the contrary, our leading man, Aiden has empathy in surplus. It seems to have awoken sometime in his early forties and upturned his life as a cattle rancher. As he deals with this, the woman he has fallen for has a problem child ( one of two children, the other girl being a very nice individual). This book is about how human nature forgets the steps taken to get someplace once they are there ( I am paraphrasing from the book) and how the vicious cycle of something bad can be broken with the heart in the right place and by following that heart’s lead( again, paraphrasing a statement made in the book).

Aiden,Gwen, Lizzie and Milo are trying to be a family, each in their own way. It was delightful to read how it unfolded.