One Summer Sunrise - Shari Low

Reading Challenge Category: Free ARC from NetGalley

Official Blurb:

Today, Maisie McTeer decides to track down the ex who jilted her at the altar. Today, she’ll find out that revisiting the past can also rewrite her future.
After losing her husband, Harriet Bassett can no longer bear her lonely life. Today, a familiar face in a crowd will spark a quest to discover if there’s something and someone worth living for.
Scott and Kelly Bassett’s daughter is leaving home. Today, Scott plans to tell Kelly that he’s ending their marriage to pursue his rock and roll dreams.
However, Kelly, has a bombshell of her own. How will Scott react to the news that a new arrival is on the way to fill their empty nest?
Between sunrise and sunset, there’s love, heartbreak, laughter and tears, but who will find happiness at the end of the day?

My Thoughts:

It took me a while to get through this book, but I think that is more my mind being preoccupied than an insult on the book. I think if I had been wholly committed to reading, then I would have devoured this book.
As with all of Shari Low books, you find yourself laughing out loud, grinning along with the characters but on an equal measure sobbing your heart out with them also. This book has all of that; my emotions were in tatters when I’d finished it.
The characters are wonderfully eccentric, another trait of Low’s, but this nuttiness is what makes the characters so loveable.
As with some of Low’s previous books, the book is divided into two-hour segments, and we are following four protagonists throughout just one day. We have Maisie, recently jilted at the altar and putting her shattered heart and life back together. There is Harriett, an 80-year-old lady who has had it tough and has had enough. That is until one day she sees life is still worth living. The third and fourth characters are husband and wife Kelly and Scott. They have been together for 22 years since they were 16. They are both going through some personal troubles, not helped by their only daughter flying the rest the very next day.
There are lots of ups and some downs. I think Harriett’s story punched me in the gut the most. As a childless woman with an older husband, I may one day find myself looking down the barrel of Harriett’s life, and it wasn’t a pleasant thought, and I chocked up on more than one occasion reading her sections.
This was a genuinely heartwarming and wonderful book, and I just wished I’d had the right headspace to give it the attention it so deserved. It was beautifully written, and we were introduced to some fantastic characters, which I hope we may see on the periphery of future books.
As a side note, I liked that the author explained that even though it is set in 2021, the characters don’t have the pandemic that we are all bogged down with. It certainly was nice to escape this and enter an alternate reality!

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