Black & White Flowers

by Rachel Robinson

Check your heart in at the front door with this one ladies, it is going to leave you bruised! Emotionally this was a book that had more than tangent that dragged me in but the main pull, well for me anyway was the fact that it positively encouraged me to think about what I was reading and what the characters not only had already been through but were going through now.

Life after abuse is hardly an easy subject matter and Carina had been through more than most, having suffered both physically and verbally while she was a child, but as is often the case abused children unfortunately find that the pattern of abuse follows them into adulthood and for Carina that was very much the case, her current relationship was abusive.

She was lucky that she had one very, very strong means of support, her friend Jasmine because with her love and support she was able to both physically and emotionally able to leave it behind, I understood just what taking that step meant to her, it might seem easy to say but I knew that it was a tough choice but I got the feeling that wit Jasmine’s help she could actually see her own worth and it was a darn sight more than her partner was willing to give her, she was best off out of it and when she finally packed her bags and struck out on her own I was silently whooping in delight.

I loved Carina’s soul, her heart was just beautiful and when she decided to write about injured service personnel she won me over, everything about her spoke of a woman who deserved to be cherished. But could she find a man that would treat her in a way that so far had eluded her? I hoped so because so far her suffering was a down right shame.

Navy Seal, Smith wears the scars of a mission that didn’t go according to plan and as much as he struggles with the physical damage that he endured it is the emotional and mental trauma that  is harder for him to deal with, there are huge chunks of his past that he just cannot remember and worst of all he can’t remember his partner Megan.

So, he volunteers to help Carina with her book. It is obvious that they like each other, and I felt the bond between the two of them, they were both suffering from their own personal nightmares but both knew that acting on the feelings was something that neither of them is willing to do, it too Megan to walk away from Smith before they could even contemplate something more.

I admired Megan for the fact that she was able to see that Smith wasn’t the man she fell in love with and that the feelings he had for her now were not what they should have been, his attraction to Carina was obvious or at least to the woman that wanted that attraction to be aimed at her it was, so refusing to be second best, she deserves more, she cuts not only him but herself loose and leaves.

But what about Smith?

Letting Megan leave was easy when he had no idea of the history they had shared; how would he cope if and when he regained his memory of just how much she meant to him?

What is it comes to a choice between Carina and Megan? Would Carina’s heart be broken all over again?

This was so much more than a love story, it was an evolution, it was about living through events that shape the way you feel and the life that you lead. For me irrespective of whether you experience good or bad in life, those experiences don’t define you, it is what you do about those experiences and how you shape your life after those experiences that define you, Carina and Smith worked with that for me and that meant I understood them.