A Heart To Call Home by Jeanie Levig

⭐⭐⭐⭐☆

There are some authors that we pick up when we are feeling particularly self-indulgent. When we want to pamper ourselves. When we want a specially fulfilling feeling emotionally and mentally. Jeannie Levig is one such author and this book doesn’t fail on any front.

Two women, Jessie and Dakota are linked by a violent past: Jessie’s beloved sister, Jackie died and in car accident, and the car was driven by Dakota. Having lost both her parents and her only sibling, Jessie gladly leaves the town behind to carve a life for herself.

Three decades later, she returns to the town to make peace with her past. She joins her old school as a substitute English teacher. Dakota is the coach in the same school. Meeting each other is inevitable. While Jessie blames Dakota for her sister’s death, she also cannot completely tamp out the childhood crush that she had on Dakota.

They get off on a rocky start but the attraction builds. When Dakota learns about Jessie’s link to her personal nightmare, an accident that she never recovered from, she wants to have nothing to do with the woman to whom she is inexplicably drawn to.

The author draws Jessie as a tender, gentle, giving soul and Dakota as a vulnerable, traumatised person covering it all under bravado.

This is a book about tragedy, coping with it and healing. It is a book about attraction and about giving. It is a book more about love than just romance.

Levig’s books are never just point-in-time romances. They are true love stories. They allow us to soak in the characters, the place and all the other characters that people the books. She makes us feel every feeling along with the MCs. In fact, in less than a thousand words, she makes us ache for the troubled, dead Jackie.

This book is the written version of comfort food for the soul. Definitely a must-read.

⭐⭐⭐⭐☆