Before I Let Go

"Panic rings a bell in my head and the sound of my own blood rushes in my ear like an alarm. The walls I’ve built to contain my feelings are falling. It’s not a wrecking ball that starts the demolition. It begins with a tremor, a realization that love happens in the fragile context of our mortality. That love and life occur just beyond the reach of our control. There is only one letter of difference between love and lose, and somewhere along the way, for me they became synonymous. I understand now that something broke in me after my parents died that somehow healed wrong, and I started measuring how much I loved people in terms of how much it would hurt to lose them."

I read constantly. I listen to audiobooks, and I also read in the romance genre that I write in. Occasionally, a book surfaces from the rest that takes my breath away. Before I Let Go by Kennedy Ryan was one such book. It was just magnificent.

I found myself stopping at parts to absorb the words, the ideas, the truth of what was being expressed but also the beauty of how the words are laid down. She laid those words down.

The story is about love and family. It is about loss and grief. It is about forgiving others and forgiving yourself. It is about the human experience.

“I’ve fallen in love with the warrior woman who walked through fire, the one who came through stronger, reshaped by sorrow, reformed by grief, reborn in joy.”

One of the themes that stood out to me was that even though society tends to stereotype us, women don’t have a monopoly on emotions. After a miscarriage that rocked their world and brought Yasmen to her knees, one of the things that led to her asking for a divorce was because she thought Josiah didn’t care, that he didn’t mourn the loss like she did.

Josiah mourned in a different way. Silently. Stoically. Because there was still a business to run and a family to provide for. He had to stay strong because she fell apart. Later we realize that he had a lot of baggage to unpack around grief because he hadn’t dealt with any of the losses he had experienced in his life. The quote above came from his internal dialogue when he started seeing a therapist and was slowly beginning to do the work needed to heal and become whole again. And the truth of his words stopped me in my tracks ‘That love and life occur just beyond the reach of our control.’ How true is this? As much as we want to exercise control, we must accept that sometimes things just spin off in directions that we never anticipated.

I can’t recommend this book enough. It’s a grown-up book with several difficult themes that may be triggering for some but they are handled with great care.

The prose is so delicious that you can almost taste it and the emotional intelligence that it takes to write multiple characters with such depth and slowly evolving emotional awareness leaves me in awe of Ms. Ryan.

Five Stars *****