First and Last

by Rachael Duncan

I’m feeling wiped out this week, I have read a number of books that have almost drained me emotionally and when I started this I knew I had entered the eye of the storm because one this pushed me over the edge.

Start to finish I was broken, I cried more through this book than I have through any other in what seems like a lifetime.

Childhood friends, the beautiful Mia moved into the house next door to Blake when she was a young girl and from then on they were best friends but as they grew up, nature took its course there was an inevitable growth of feelings, but life isn’t fair and the ferocity of emotion was not equally distributed,

Blake wanted more than Mia could give, changing the dynamic of their relationship was a step too far for Mia, she was terrified that moving into that sort of relationship was only setting themselves up to fail, if a relationship as lovers fell apart she would lose the only man that she had ever cared about and that was a price that she wasn’t ready to pay. She couldn’t be without him, even if that meant she couldn’t have him the way they both truly wanted.

But Blake was having none of it, he was determined that she was going to see that they made sense together and that when it came to them there was no end, they would always be together, their first and last everything.

The author drew beautiful pictures with her words and allowed me the reader the space and opportunity to colour in those pictures with my imagination. She didn’t over complicate the story but she left nothing to chance. She gave them both the opportunity to evolve and through that evolution she gave their relationship time to develop, I wanted then to be everything they needed and more and when I flipped over the last page I did so content in the knowledge that Ms Duncan has tied up all the loose ends, she had wrapped a beautifully sensitive and wonderfully romantic love story with the biggest of bows.