If I'd Never Known Your Love

I'd like to note that the name of the book is If I'd Never Known Your Love, but the Kindle edition is mislabeled as If I'd Known Your Love and so if does not come up under the correct title as being available as an eBook. I selected this because I saw it mentioned on a couple review sites a while back and saw someone mention it here on the romance board, reminding me that I owned it. I hate when someone I love is late coming home. Many people take it in stride, but I'm the kind of person who imagines the worst. Here is a book that absolutely feeds into my morbid thought processes. Thanks. ;) If I'd is an effective tearjerker, because it's about what happens after a worst fear comes true. The fear that a loved one simply will not be coming home. After all, that is probably something most of us will face in one way or another, hopefully with a chance to say goodbye. Julia has a terrific marriage and two children with her high school sweetheart. He goes on a business trip to Columbia and she soon receives a call that he's been abducted. The majority of the book is a period recap of their courtship and marriage and how she deals with the present day reality of his abduction and events associated with the abduction. The abduction and resolution takes place over years. The book, and I'm being careful not to do spoilers, also explores her meeting a man who is very like her husband and with whom she could have a successful relationship depending on ... stuff. That storyline was very sweet and done well. Particular as she bonds with this man over helping a dog in distress. The style was clever, allowing us to know Julia and Evan as a couple while Julia is wondering if she'll ever see him again. The past is definitely prologue, but the author chooses to share it in a different way than if she'd made it a literal prologue. The past was alive with Julia and alive for the reader. I really enjoyed the book, however, events at the end were rushed and I imagine a lot of readers might feel they were owned a scene or two more.

First book I've ever read that had me literally sobbing. Rest assured, there is an HEA, but it's a brutal trip there. The book opens as Evan McDonald is getting ready to fill in for his boss on a business trip to Colombia. After telling his wife Julia "I'm going to miss you. Every minute of every hour..." he's off on his trip. After the time he said he'd call comes and goes, Julia starts to worry. When she tries to reach him and can't, panic sets in. Eventually Julia finds herself in a nightmare scenario. The doting father or their two kids and the love of her life has been kidnapped by paramilitary forces. This heartwrenching book follows Julia through the years as she works to find Evan and bring him home, while keeping his memory alive and keeping life normal for the kids. Though Evan is absent from the present tense of the book, Bockoven develops his character through the letters Julia writes to him in her journal describing their courtship and love. After being missing for five years, Julia gets the dreaded phone call - Evan's body has been found and he's been dead for five years. It's the second half of the book that takes your heart and smashes it up thoroughly. I've already told you there's an HEA, but if I tell any more, I'll ruin it for you, and this book is too emotional to miss out on a good virgin reading. I have never read a book that made me feel like this book did. Bockoven draws you into the characters of Evan and Julia and I mourned for Evan as much as I mourned for her. Their love, as told through her letters, was so strong and such a once in a lifetime chance that I mourned that loss. I had a pile of tissues around me, and I never cry at books or movies. The only qualm I had was that the book ended far too quick. We get our HEA, after bawling our eyeballs out in empathy with the heroine, but don't get to see the heroine really enjoy her second chance. I felt I needed more of a debriefing after the strong emotions she got from me. Overall, this was an excellent book and one I'll remember for a long time.

Sacramento based designer Julia McDonald becomes concerned for no reason re her husband's sudden business trip to Columbia when he replaces a peer who cannot make it. She soon learns that paranoia can be real when Evan is abducted. Julia makes every effort to recover her spouse safely, but though she meets the demands of the kidnappers, he never comes home. Five years later, Julia focuses on her two children, Shelley and Jason, still traumatized by what happened to their father. Though they have finally had his body returned to them and buried him they each pray everyday to turn back the hands of time before he left for South America. Julia's catharsis is a letter she writes of her life with her beloved before the serpents destroyed their personal Eden. This is an interesting family drama that initially focuses on the impact of a lack of closure has on a spouse and offspring, but deftly moves into grief for a beloved one. Julia and her children cannot fully move on because they still have a fiber of hope that Evan is alive and will come home to them soon until his corpse is returned to them. The three surviving MacDonalds struggle with their loss as each grieves and copes differently wondering what they could have done differently to inform the patriarch how much they love him; in the end that is the key message to tell your loved ones how much you love them. Harriet Klausner

If I'd Never Known Your Love is an innovative epic romance of reasonably short length told through letters and memories by a wife whose husband has been kidnapped. The images are beautiful, the emotions wide-ranged, the main character determined in action yet also perceptive in vision. Although there are moments of suspense throughout this romance, this is not so much the story of Evan's kidnapping as it is Julia's story of her lifetime love of Evan. If I'd Never Known Your Love is the story of an epic love which begins in childhood and continues for decades, even when the two are separated. This is also the story of romance within the everyday details of marriage. If I'd Never Known Your Love is a tender yet refreshingly deep romance rather than an adventure tale. Although absent throughout most of the novel, the structure of the novel makes Evan present in the heart of the heroine and the reader in new ways. Julia writes letters to Evan to help her remember their love and to tell him all the things she never told him. She creates the history of their relationship. Outside of the letters, passages of interior monologue create memories of love found in small moments sometimes lost in hectic everyday life. If I'd Never Known Your Love provokes feelings of sadness in me that romances often do not. Fortunately, like most romances, the romance reader can look forward to a happy ending although not necessarily the happy ending one might expect. A wonderful read from beginning to end!