Acquired Book By: I am a regular tour hostess for blog tours via Cedar Fort whereupon I am thankful to have such a diverse amount of novels and non-fiction titles to choose amongst to host. I received a complimentary copy of “Unseen Road to Love” direct from the publisher Bonneville Books (imprint of Cedar Fort, Inc) in exchange for an honest review. I did not receive compensation for my opinions or thoughts shared herein.
What drew my interest to read this particular INSPY Rom:
I love stories like these that involve the uncertainty after a coma! Do you remember the film “While You Were Sleeping”?? There was another one starring Reese Witherspoon too. I love those timeless Romances of the unknown!! – initial reaction
It is quite true – I have a penchant for stories, especially Romances surrounding someone whose succumbed to a traumatic accident and/or has entered into a coma. Earlier this year, I found a story which truly was eloquently written and alleviated fiction to a new layer of insight on a how a story such as this can be told. Even Hallmark Channel produced an incredibly humbling film starring Lindy Booth which still to this day is one of my favourites to re-see each Christmas. There is a lot of hope and a huge walk of faith to heal and recover from injuries serious enough to cause a person to enter a coma.
Unlike terminal illnesses, I find I can handle these kinds of stories far better because their more about healing and the spiritual side of how the art of healing is not entirely understood from our point of view here on Earth. There is a lot to be said for the consistency of prayer and of riding through adverse situations by the hope of what we all have inside us for the tomorrows which feel so very uncertain. Sometimes you do not even have time to pray or to hope for an outcome that is not as dire as it becomes; life can change in the blink of an eye as so much can happen in the instant everything spins out of control; especially during a car accident. I briefly mentioned my family’s accident recently whilst musing about the complexities of the natural world and our participation in the fragile balance of Earth’s ecological harmony.
However, the author’s car accident and my family’s accident have one major difference: we were spared injury and walked away unscathed. After spinning three times on the highway and slamming hard into the ditch whilst flipping over several times, no one was more surprised by this outcome than the first responders who were quite agape on scene afterwards. We were out of state and it was late at night. The lesson learnt that night is commuting back to one’s hotel after a day trip away from where your staying isn’t worth risking driving whilst your too tired to make the journey back. Also, one’s hamster can survive without having his ‘breakfast’ on schedule. It was the scariest moment in our lives – we pitched or rather hovered briefly on the brink of ‘going over’ but what looked like a canyon was the car exiting the spin and about to roll. Dad and I woke up first and all we had time to say is we were together; come what may, we were all together.
It’s true – sometimes you get second chances at unexpected moments where you never realised how close you were to having your life on the line. Eleven years later, I’ve never forgotten what happened that night nor how we were smiling for the camera a short while later, as the police officer took our picture in front of the Beetle which sacrificed it’s life to save ours. We were truly blessed the car held it’s integrity even if the accident itself rendered it undriveable. The fuller story behind that night is a testament of our faith and of how faith pulls you through at moments where prayer isn’t possible but your faith is still a rock and shield to your soul. Miracles are everywhere. You just have to remain open to experiencing them when you never thought they’d enter your life.
Notation on Cover Art: I truly love this cover art! It has the light of faith and the burst of angelic intervention about it! I love the swirls of purple and of the shining light behind the couple, too. It’s a book cover befitting an INSPY read and a story of uplifting courage and remarkable recovery through holding strong to one’s faith and believing adversity and strife can be overcome.
Unseen Road to Love
The airbag deployed as the impact shoved his car across the ice and straight into the intersection. In that same time frame, the car's back end drifted into a half circle, until the last thing Logan saw was another set of lights in the passenger window. And then,...
From the outside, Logan Atwood's life looks perfect: a successful career, a lavish lifestyle. But after a brutal car accident leaves him in a coma, Logan suddenly finds himself five years in the past. Only then does he realize that his perfect world may have cost him the woman of his dreams and the faith he once loved. Is it too late for Logan's second chance?
Places to find the book:
ISBN: 9781462120055
on 9th May, 2017
Pages: 304
Published By: Bonneville Books (@BonnevilleBooks),
an imprint of Cedar Fort, Inc (@CedarFortBooks)
Available Formats: Paperback, Ebook
Read this novels INSPIRATIONS | contains SPOILERS via the author’s blog
Converse on Twitter via: #INSPY #Romance or #INSPYRom
About Chelsea Curran
Chelsea Curran lives in the desert valley of Arizona, and has an associates degree in general education from Dixie State University. Though secretly a romantic, she used to spend most of her time brooding over the idea of love until her college roommates introduced her to the exciting and fantastic world of romance novels. When she’s not teaching, dancing, painting, laughing or baking cookies, she’s in her blanket fort giggling over the handsome hero capturing the fair lady’s heart. By experience, she believes one good book can change a person’s life forever.
Logan’s journey:
As Logan was guided about the perimeters of his journey inside his coma by a mentor of unknown origins (although you can guess as to who Tommy is and where he is from) he has to re-align his heart to walk down corridors of time he left behind. As he starts his journey, the sequences of his actions are re-played similar to how they would in a film; Curran even re-establishes the dialogue as they were once shared but adds in a few differences between the two sequences as well. As although Logan is meant to re-walk through his life, he’s not meant to live it exactly as he once did. In this, there is room for liberties to be taken in regards to his words, his actions and his reactions. Since we were only privy to one short period of time in the coffeehouse, Curran leads us forward and guides through how Logan chooses to approach his ‘second chance’ of seeing how life affords us different paths to take and how in our choosing how our lives are affected.
Logan chooses to avoid his career and take a chance on getting to know the artist: Addie. In the opening bits of their dialogue, I felt some of the conversations between them were slightly awkward even though that was bound to happen as they were thrown into each others’ lives. I tend to notice dialogue as it has been a struggle of my own (as a writer) but I overlooked this as I was already attached to Logan’s journey be as it were to find what he had lost. It wasn’t even something he had spent time seeking out – rather he was given an opportunity to see what he had been blind towards seeing himself. The dialogue evened out eventually and you could see Curran’s writerly rhythm start to emerge and take flight.
The interesting bit about his journey is how he was focusing on what drew a wedge between himself and his family. He was given the time to ‘go back’ to when things weren’t fractured and when he was still on good terms with his siblings. His memories were still with him of what really happened; Curran knitted in his anxiety and his apprehension of being ‘home’ but at the same time showed how Logan tried to go with the flow of what was evolving in front of him, too. It’s a test of will and a test of resolve; how do you go backwards when you know your actions had severe consequences in the present?
my review of unseen road to love:
I had to smirk into a small bubble of a laugh seeing Logan’s reaction to his alarm clock! For similar reasons of the insanity of having such a device ping it’s shrill into your life, I don’t always feel keen on having one go off! Especially as nowadays they sound like miniature tornado sirens gone awry! I digress. Finding out Logan was living in St. George, Utah made me smile; it’s a city I know quite a bit about as it was one of the many locations my family considered relocating too over the years. There were a few things making St. George stand-out to us, including the incredible back-drop of it’s location! Those kinds of formations and the scenic beauty puts the city at the distinctive level of being ‘top of it’s natural class of awe-inspiring locations’ even if it’s fuller history of nuclear testing marked it as one city we’d admire through YouTube and avoid in person.
His stay in St. George was limited to being the catalyst moment of what launched his career in Chicago; although, as the first chapter served as setting up the foreshadow of events to come – it was when Curran allowed Logan the grace to acknowledge an inner well of truth about considering not accepting the job offer which clued me in this was one of his original cross-roads. He didn’t have to accept the job right then and there; he had realised in his heart he was going to disappoint his family once more; a family he hadn’t even seen in recent years. On the flipside, this was something I could never sacrifice myself; time with family. The hours you give up with your family are never recovered no matter how you try to justify the distance is worth your career. I was quite anxious at this junction to see how Logan’s career had carted him off further from his family but also, at what cost overall to his personal life. The random meeting he had with a girl whose artistic nature was self-evident by her art supplies made me think of Curran herself as she’s both writer and artist. Once I had learnt this story was partially autobiographically inspired, I started to keep my eyes and mind attune to other small gestures or nuances taken from her life or her inner circle.
This is part cautionary in how the accident occurred – as Logan tempted fate by taking an unploughed road to visit a friend knowing he was too tired to drive. The accident slammed him into a series of life-threatening injuries where neither paramedic nor doctor in the ER knew if he would survive. The very next instant, the journey he takes through a coma begins as he remembers where he was in life prior to ‘waking up’ where he does but the clock is off in his memories – meaning, he’s waking up five years prior to when the accident happened. This jars him quite sufficiently as how can you reverse time and be somewhere you were in the past if you remember you were at a considerable distance in the future!?
As I grew up watching It’s A Wonderful Life every Christmas, you could say I have a natural deposition to gravitate towards stories of ‘what if’ you took this fork in the road and hadn’t made that particular choice when another one might have led to the better outcome in the end? There are a healthy variety of spins on this classic story, many of which I happily watch on Lifetime or Hallmark during the holidays (one in particular stars Nancy McKeon but the one with Nicole Eggert is equally heart-warming). As said, I’m naturally attracted to these stories – so finding Logan was in a position to re-live and re-examine a marked choice in his life’s trajectory fit right in with what I expect and dearly enjoy about these stories!
Whilst Logan is taking his journey elsewhere, his mother is taking her own by his side at the hospital. She was the only one who was able to fly out to be at the hospital during his initial days of the coma. His younger brother wanted to travel with her, but she advised against it; not just out of financial reasons either. When she mentions feeling an overwhelming sense of calm at a point in time where she should be feeling anything but calm it reminded me of the calm I felt myself when my Dad was in the hospital last year. Somewhere along the way, your faith overtakes your life during extreme emergencies. Your not going to have the best of days through the situation but there are other moments, like the one she was feeling in his flat which alarm you for how well you do feel and how comforting it is to realise how you feel in that moment where the world feels off it’s axis.
Truthsayers arrive in your life at unexpected moments of clarity which is exactly how I think Logan felt about his younger brother Mark being his soothsayer after he left the hospital. Mark was ahead of his years and yet, he was on the fringes of entering his adulthood. The years had separated the two brothers, but Mark never failed in his unyielding hope his brother would see the error of his ways and either find redemption or solace in the forgiveness of his transgressions. Logan had gone down so many darkened avenues since he left home, he wasn’t quite sure how to walk a path he could honestly be proud of rather than the regret he had to choke down instead. The accident afforded him a retrospective on his life but the outcome of the accident was giving him a period of healing. Not just for his physical wounds and injuries but to turn introspective to heal his mind and heart whilst granting him the rare privilege of making amends for lost time with his family.
Shifting out of the coma, Curran places everyone back into Logan’s timeline but in different ways than he was expecting. She also kept him a bit in the dark and questioning of who Addie is vs. knowing exactly why she was important to him to find. When Addie enters Logan’s life for the second time – in the timeline of his life – Curran found a way to re-create their initial meeting but with the switch of Addie being in the same city as Logan (Chicago). She also didn’t force how Addie and Logan became re-attached to each other in the present. If anything, she allowed them the flexibility to re-approach moments together where they would both be on equal footing rather than Logan knowing a bit more about Addie than she would naturally know or understand about him. Addie still was unsure about trusting men – she had a good feeling about Logan but given her past experiences, you can understand her hesitations. Logan in return is tempering his interest in her to take things slower if it meant for the first time in a long time he could have an authentic relationship with someone he could conceive as being a life partner.
You get so caught up in this story, you don’t want it to end anytime soon. Curran wrote such a believable Romance; in the small gestures of an old time love story, where everything is organically evolving out of mutual curiosity & respect. Where things aren’t entirely black or white in regards to definitions or understandings; but where with a little nudge of hope & the joy of embracing the unknown… you can find your happily ever after. Definitely one of my #unputdownable finds for the year, as it’s a Sweet Romance you can get lost inside.
on the inspy romance style of chelsea curran:
Although this is Curran’s debut novel, the method in which it is written is quite polished for a writer’s first outing. She has the mark of a seasoned writer by how well in-tune she is with creating a dramatic connection between her character’s soulful journey towards understanding his own place in this world and the reader’s willingness to take that journey with him. She pulls you into the narrative by how she presents his motivations and the way in which he ignores his intuition. She even leaves a bit of a mark of curious serendipity of roads not taken, of conversations never spoken. By the time you exit her first chapter, you’ve already become smitten to know how the story ends.
I truly loved the world-building Curran put into the background of her story; especially as a lot of what she fused into the context of ‘life during comatose states’ mirrors my own thoughts on the subject. It’s always wicked brilliant to find a writer (either in fiction or film) who matches your own ruminations about the subject as it allows you to dig a bit deeper into the story as if it were one you could realistically see being lived. One thing she did was to mention how despite being in a coma, the mind and the actions you take whilst in a particularly intensive dream-state share the reality of your life outside this journey. Meaning, for everything you think into action your body will respond in kind during the reality of your time ‘elsewhere’. Or to put it another way, even when we’re asleep we’re still physically present for everything that happens even if we’re not conscious.
As this is an INSPY Rom, I had to smile how easily it was to recognise the traditions of Logan’s faith as this is told from an LDS point of view. I’ve learnt a lot about the faith (as I’m a non-LDS Protestant myself) of the LDS Church through my readings of titles from both Cedar Fort and the Church’s Historian Press. Curran adds subtle moments of Logan’s spiritual walk into his journey back through time to understand the fuller scope of his present predicament. In his faith, there are certain things about his actions and choices which walk against his faith (ie. coffee and causal relationships being two of them) but whilst he’s re-emerging himself into his past, Curran makes sure to guide Logan back to the principles he once held dear to his soul.
NOTE: on Quirky Inclusions:
Not only does Curran include a series of text messages between Addie and Logan but they are seen as ‘bubbles’ of text in the book, as if you were reading the convo on a smart phone. Quite clever. Also, thankfully they are not needlessly bogged down in ‘text speak’ for those of us who never text. If you follow me on Twitter, you’ll denote I rarely opt to ‘cut’ my words or messages into smaller portions of how anything I tweet would normally be said. Inveribly it’s only for lack of shortened space and it’s so rare, most of my Twitter feeds are a mirror to spoken speech as you can get.
Secondly, there are pop cultural references and aptly chosen ‘coma’ film references and/or journeys of the mind which leave an effect on the character after they awaken. Each of the references are well-timed and organically threaded into the narrative, too.
reading habit:
Whilst listening to #SlackerRadio lately, I am finding musical soundscapes which befit each book I am reading. The added benefit is a musical landscape of songs and ballads which quite serendipitously in their own regard provide their own unique atmospheric backdrop to the stories! The interesting bit to mention are the selections are actually so well timed and listened too in step with the narratives, one would have thought the soundscapes and the text were meant to be in sync! For this novel, I tuned into the ‘Mumford and Friends’ station which uniquely provided an Indie Folk and Pop narrative of song craft!
{SOURCES: Cover art of “Unseen Road to Love”, book synopsis, author biography, author photograph of Chelsea Curran as well as the blog tour badges were all provided by Cedar Fort, Inc. and used with permission. Post dividers by Fun Stuff for Your Blog via Pure Imagination. Tweets were able to be embedded by the codes provided by Twitter. Blog graphics created by Jorie via Canva: Book Review Banner using Unsplash.com (Creative Commons Zero) Photography by Frank McKenna and the Comment Box Banner.}
Copyright © Jorie Loves A Story, 2017.
Comments via Twitter:
#JorieReads | #INSPY #Romance
Unseen Road to Love by @Iwriteandpaint#BookReview NEW spin on It's A Wonderful Lifehttps://t.co/cosqbfjPYu pic.twitter.com/oWXbSrBsWa— Jorie Story 📖🎧 (@joriestory) May 1, 2017
Leave a Reply