After the Rain by Renee Carlino
I have had After the Rain on my Kindle for probably a year now. I am a big fan of Renee Carlino's and I grabbed this one while it was on sale awhile ago and just never got around to reading until last week.
Renee is a great teller of love stories and this book was no different. This is the story of Avelina ("Ava") and Nate. You meet Ava in the beginning as a young girl who grew up with a fairly idealistic life until her father passes away when she is a teenager. After that, her mom falls into a very deep depression and Ava is basically raising herself. Ava aspires to be a nurse but has a love of horses and is traveling around with her mother and winning barrel races on her prized horse. On one of these trips Ava meets Jake, another rodeo guy, and falls in love. She drops out of high school and marries him three months later. Ava's mom moves to Spain to live with family and her older brother is an attorney in New York. Ava and Jake live together on a ranch in Montana where they assist on the ranch and have a wonderful young love story. One day they are out moving cattle when they get trapped in a sudden snow storm and Jake is trampled by one of the horses as he tries to block the horse from trampling Ava. He is paralyzed from the waist down as a result of these injuries. Ava tries to keep loving him, but Jake falls deep into drinking and becomes abusive to Ava. One day, after beating Ava up pretty badly, he kills himself and Ava is left alone and devastated and carrying a ton of guilt for the things that happened to Jake.
Nate grows up wanting to be a cardiac surgeon just like his father. He excels in medical school and begins his medical career working in an LA hospital along side his father. Five years into his career, he has a young patient die on his table, not because of his error, but he did overlook an issue that would have changed the diagnosis. He has terrible guilt and his father suggests he take one month off and go stay on the ranch where his uncle is a veterinarian in - you guessed it - Montana!
Nate meets Ava four years after Jake's death and she is a walking shadow of the person she was. She doesn't interact with others on the ranch and she still carries so much guilt. Nate starts to chip away at her defenses and slowly they start to build a love story.
No major shockers in this story, but it is a nice love story of them both learning to find balance. As Ava put it at one point, "she needed to learn to give LESS and Nate needed to learn to give MORE."
Some pivotal moments were when Ava's beloved horse gets injured and she has to shoot it. I definitely was crying in bed for this. I actually squeezed my eyes shut as if it would stop me from "seeing" it.
Ava goes to Spain to spend time with her mother and asks Nate to give her a year to be apart. The last 50 pages or so are letters from Nate to Ava over the course of that year as he waits for her. In the end, Ava returns home to Nate in LA and the presumption is they will live happily ever after. Ahhh!
Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐
Comments
Post a Comment