LEFT TO CHANCE by Amy Sue Nathan / YA / Released Nov 2017 by St. Martin’s Griffin
“Left to Chance” by Amy Sue Nathan is an engaging read, the author’s voice capturing my attention immediately, and the story line holding my attention from beginning to end.
“Left to Chance” is heroine Teddi Lerner’s journey to a past she’s been trying to avoid for six years. Back in Chance, her small home town in Ohio, lay memories of her deceased best friend, her best friend’s surviving daughter and husband, and their joint friends who feel abandoned by Teddi’s six year absence which began before her friend’s funeral even ended. To escape her hurt and her responsibility in the hurt of others, Teddi has spent her time away from Chance forging a new identity – success as a photographer and in a relationship with a well-known and enviable man. But when she finds herself back in Chance to photograph the wedding of her deceased friend’s husband who has healed enough to move on, she finds herself in an eruption of pain, conflict, attacks, and concessions she must choose to face or run from…again.
This book, with its appealing inner voice of the heroine, contains humor and suffering, insight and conflict, as well as romance and separation. There are moments that seem brutal when the past raises its head against Teddi and she against it, but it is the story of a journey…backward or forward…for her and each character involved.
As an author, Amy has done a clean job of keeping to her plot, moving it at a nice pace, and weaving her characters forward along its line. Her characters are viable, identifiable, and so real that sometimes I wanted to reach into the page and smack them. A couple of them made me groan, and I wondered why Teddi liked them, but if a book doesn’t make me groan then it’s likely missing some human honesty. So Amy has done a good job of giving us a heroine we like and want to see succeed, plus a number of potential heroes who are each on their own journey until at last only one rises above the others.
I thank The Book Breeze for giving me the opportunity to review this book. As an author, reader, critique partner, and part time copy editor I approach any book with a magnifying glass, seeing enough to take me beyond the simple “I liked it” or “I didn’t.” With “Left to Chance” I was pleased at all levels, and commend even the publisher St. Martin’s Griffin for clean editing, formatting, and easy to read sentence structure.
Colleen L Donnelly
Amazon #1 Bestselling Author
Share this:
