4.5 Stars for this intriguing and original plot!

[Margaret, Book Explosion Moderator]

When this book was presented to me for review, I found the description interesting, but I wasn’t intrigued, in fact , I almost felt like the description summarized the book in too much detail and didn’t leave any surprises, I was wrong.

Gabe and Carly desperately want a child together, but after many failures, they find themselves at the mercy of a doctor, who agrees to help (and does indeed help) but with a few very strange conditions. Gabe’s teenage daughter, Megan, just wants her dead mother back, something she simply cannot have. Gabe’s father, Yehuda, doesn’t want to leave his longtime home in NYC, but also realizes his years are numbered and he wants to spend what time he has left living with his family.

One of the strange conditions from the eccentric fertility doctor is that the Berk family move within twenty or thirty minutes of the fertility clinic before Carly’s last trimester begins. This means finding a home, uprooting an emotional teenage daughter from her friends and school and moving an old man away from the home he’s known most of his life. When Gabe comes across an old abandoned house on a bluff overlooking the ocean, he’s drawn to it, even though the amount of work needed to make it livable will put his family into even more turmoil. The house is full of ghosts, literally and figuratively, and those ghosts are tied to the town of Island Bluffs in ways that the family couldn’t even imagine. To make things worse, the eccentric doctor’s additional condition was to have Carly carry two babies, one her own, the other to be given to the doctor at birth, no questions asked.

The story is strange, the writing style eclectic to the point that you feel like you’re reading multiple stories at once, then suddenly they converge and just as suddenly they separate again. At points, I felt like I knew where things were going and the story slowed down a bit, then the author throws in a new twist and you’re intrigued all over again. I enjoy stories that haunt me when I’m not reading them, this was definitely one of them, each time I put the book down I wanted to pick it right back up again. This story was very well written and the plot was one of the most original plots I’ve had the pleasure of experiencing in a long time.

This book was provided to me for free for an honest and unbiased review (see all our reviews at http://www.bookexplosions.com/ or on Goodreads at https://www.goodreads.com/group/show/... )