Review

Jesse Ryder is coming home to Texas. She’s been gone over fifteen years working as a photojournalist overseas, but now her free roaming career is at a halt due to a devastating eye disease. Her goal in returning is to see her birth daughter and her sister again before she loses the ability to see forever. Problem is her daughter, Lila, was adopted by her sister and she knows nothing of this family secret.

Elder sister Luz gave up a future career for Lila and her husband Ian. She’s been ‘Mom’ for too long and Jesse’s return turns her carefully ordered life upside down. Secrets tumble out amid heartaches, parenting challenges, love finally found, and jealous tension between sisters. The question is if family can survive in the most devastating lies and does love conqueror all?

Home Before Dark had a decent beginning and the secrets Jesse carried were numerous plus heartbreaking. I found the characters to be well-developed and the emotional turmoil expressed in the story is done very well. Wigg’s has a way with words and setting. Jesse’s love interest, a handsome and widowed pilot is personally my favorite character. His back-story is just as breathtaking and poignant as the man himself.  The story is told from multiple points of view so you get to see the thoughts and feelings from all the major characters, which to me was another one of the things holding the story together.

If you take away those things, then the rest is where the book fell flat for me. There was plenty of conflict, but everything was easily forgiven and forgotten or resolved with barely any fight. I found Jesse’s character not very easy to relate to, and tended to sometimes feel she didn’t deserve an HEA no matter what. If the author intended for sympathy towards Jesse, I was unable to give her very much. All the conflicts that occur build off of Jesse’s present and past mistakes, with a spackling of teen angst that added little for me.

Without going into detail, I will say that the ending left me floored and not in a good way. Floored as in the story ended too soon with allusions and no epilogue. I about screamed. This is just a personal preference, but I like my romance books to resolve completely at the end. A finality of the story is a big thing for me. Overall, I would not read this one again.

Reviewed by Landra