My 22nd Kristin Hannah book! Can we believe it? Only one more book still in print to go!
What to expect in this book:
-Magical realism
-Historical romance
-Trauma and troubled characters
-Unlikely love stories
-Outlaws/cowboys
-The Wild West
Thoughts
As I have mentioned with some of Kristin Hannah's older backlisted books, they are a much different vibe and genre from her more recent releases, that mostly focus on historical fiction novels about powerful leading women. Her earliest books are more historical romance or female/chick lit. They remind me more of what my mother or grandmother would have read in the 1990s. When Lightning Strikes was released in 1994 and continues to show the immense growth that she has had as a writer over the last 30 years.
Lainie is a romance writer living in Washington with her teenage daughter. Coming from a troubled past and unfamiliar with love in most forms, she clings to her writing as a sense of stability for her. However after a recent public incident, Lainie is uncertain how she will continue to write novels. Until one night, she becomes fully immersed in her story and has found herself face to face with her own antagonist and villain, Outlaw John "Killian" in 1896. Lainie has to find a way out of her own story and seek to discover if true love can actually exist for herself or if fiction is greater than fact.
In the beginning, KH advises her readers to suspend disbelief as they encounter the events in the story. I have read other books that involve an author or a reader becoming part of the story they are writing or creating, but what made this different is how she strung the storyline together to where it seemed like parallel universes. I love magical realism and so this premise was not far-fetched for me. If you enjoy a sliding doors or parallel universe story, this will make sense to you as well. The areas of concern for me were simply some questions that are never answered about Lainie's backstory as well as the intensity of the story toward the end and the overall pacing wrapped up so quickly.
Overall, for being a person that does not typically care for historical romances or Westerns, I found this to be more interesting and entertaining then I expected it to be. But overall, this ranks to the bottom of her list of books, along with some of the other older ones I have read. As always, The Nightingale and Firefly Lane will forever have special places in my heart. Kristin Hannah-keep doing what you are doing and creating stories for generations of women. I cannot wait to see what is next.