Fighting to Breathe by Aurora Rose Reynolds

There are days when I open the first page of a book and can honestly say that I get goose-bumps – I may have only read a few words or even just a few paragraphs but I know in my bones that the story before me is going to leave its mark.

This my friends is one of those books.

It is easy to say a book is fantastic, it’s amazing, that I loved every second of it and if those were enough then I would fill the next few paragraphs with all those platitudes and many, many more but I can’t do that… not because the book isn’t all those things it is, they just wouldn’t be enough.

If I was forced to sum it up I think I could with just one word- BEAUTIFUL.

But that wouldn’t make for a very interesting review now would it.

 The story is not a second chance love story in my eyes, because this is a love that never really went away – distance, life and misfortune may have kept them apart but I believe they would have always found their way back to each other.

High school sweethearts Austin and Lea were two halves of the same heart, they loved young, loved hard and loved deep but when they were tragically torn apart, everything they were destined to have was put on hold.

Time would be the only winner in this story, they both had to wait until their time was right and they were in a place where they could fulfil what the love for each other had decided all along time ago.

They each had their forever love– they had to claim it!

But life can be a bitch at times and what you want and what you get don’t always see eye to eye. Lea may be back and she as much as she is suffering, she is doing it all on her own, because that is how she has lived much of her life – alone. But when she sees Austin her loneliness is completed because the one person she had always held deep in her heart, the only person that she has ever loved has turned his back on her.

With life kicking her when she least needs it, I really felt sorry for her. But I also understood where Austin was coming from, he was acting on instinct – he was so cut up about what had happened he couldn’t see past what he had been through, he had tried so hard to find her when she left but there is only so many knockbacks and dead ends that you can come up against before you hate the fact that you are searching for a ghost and moreover you begin to hate the ghost itself for forcing you through the pain.

Austin wanted nothing but to be the support his woman needed at that time but she had run from him and taken what he was willing to offer and thrown both it and him away, he was hurt, beyond hurt really he was devastated but that hate didn’t reach his soul – I don’t know that he could ever hate her not bone deep- this was a heart and head at conflict and there was only ever going to be one winner!

There was plenty of angst and upheaval. Plenty of regret and sorrow but theirs was a story that needed to be heard and two people who had a love that had straddled their pain, a love that had transcended their situation and shaped them into the people that they were today, a love that was waiting on its other half to return, knowing that only then could it really settle and could their hearts be happy.

Time and tide waits for no man but fate cannot be denied – this pair were fated to be together – the perfect definition of soul mates and the author did them justice. She enlightened us when she laid bare the pain that was their past, she captivated us with the tragedy that was their present as they fought for what they both needed and she covered the whole thing with a liberal dusting of sparkle to illuminate the way to a future that had been a long time in the making but was well worth the wait.

The book was super, amazing, beautiful, steamy, passionate, romantic…and the list could go on and on and on and on!!!!