** spoiler alert ** I finished this book in one day and I feel it had some strong points and some low points.

First of all I think Ms. Kingsbury could have either skipped the first eight chapters or just condensed them somehow. While I understand she was trying to bring the readers up to speed on each of the families, I thought she could have done this using a lot less filler and still had everyone walking away feeling caught up.

The story of how the whole family was impacted by tragedy really shook me up. As objective as I was going into this, I still shed a few tears when the tragedy struck. I will not give away who was impacted but I will say this; I felt that the family that was impacted was one Ms. Kingsbury did not spend a lot of time covering their story. I felt that this was an easy out for her vs impacting one of the more highlighted families in this series.

I did like that they revisted Ashley's story and losses along the way (especially of baby Sarah). I felt Ashley having more of a passive role in the previous books coming up to this and i really liked seeing her come to terms with her past and taking responsibility for past mistakes. I also liked seeing her Oldest son talking about how not having his real father around impacted him and the decisions he made regarding this. The strong characters in this book seemed to be Cole, Ashley and John Baxter. Everyone else (especially Dayne didn't seem to speak to me in their grief. As a matter of fact she made Dayne seem like he was pouting because he had been adopted, etc). Of course Karen also made Katie pregnant with baby #3 at the end of the book.

I felt the end of this book was too convenient, like she wanted to tie everything up with a bow and have a happy ending for everyone. I also did like the role of Bailey and Brandon in this book; like they have been married and everything is perfect and they have no problems. She also matter of factily tied of the Cody and Andi story the same way, using 2 paragraphs to explain everything.

Even though I have been a long time fan of Karen Kingsbury, I am not interested in reading her new series in the fall. Between deleting all of the negative reviews from her Facebook page, to mirroring Bailey's life to her daughters, it just left a bad taste in my mouth. At this point I am glad I got to see how the Baxter story ended but disappointed in the last few Kingsbury books/series to continue reading.