ARC Review – Making It Last (Camelot #4) by Ruthie Knox

If this book opens the lines of communication for one couple then it’s a success no matter what the sales records say. ~ Slick, Guilty Pleasures

Description:
A hotel bar. A sexy stranger. A night of passion. There’s a part of Amber Mazzara that wants those things, wants to have a moment — just one — where life isn’t a complicated tangle of house and husband and kids and careers. Then, after a long, exhausting “vacation” with her family, her husband surprises her with a gift: a few days on the beach . . . alone.

Only she won’t be alone long, because a handsome man just bought her a drink. He’s cool, he’s confident, and he wants to take Amber to bed and keep her there for days. Lucky for them both, he’s her husband. He’s only got a few days in Jamaica to make her wildest desires come true, but if he can pull it off, there’s reason to believe that this fantasy can last a lifetime.

 

Review copy provided for an honest review

Emotionally wrecked…yes, that’s how I feel after reading this book but WOW what a book! Fourteen years after me first met Amber and Tony in How To Misbehave we see what their life has become and how broken they both are. Is this a romance? Absolutely, but it’s not a pretty one. This is a book about life after the first rush of new love, after the honeymoon is over, and after the stresses of kids, jobs, money, and family have taken their toll.

We left them in How To Misbehave just as they were really starting and we’ve seen them in the other books and know they are married, know Tony built them the house of their dreams, and know they have three rambunctious boys that they adore. But what we don’t know is that underneath all that something isn’t right and in this book we find out just how bad things are.

Left alone at a Jamaican resort following her brother’s wedding, Amber begins to dissect her life and wonders if anyone including her husband has a clue to how she’s feeling or what she’s thinking. There is no doubt this is the woman on the verge of a breakdown. Tony returns home with the kids and begins to understand just how bad things are so he returns to reclaim his wife and worries he might be too late.

I won’t lie, these two have some major issues to work through and it’s hard to see the depth of their pain and how vastly different their lives have become. But there’s hope because they are finally connecting to each other as people, as husband and wife…not Mom and Dad. There’s a message in this story, no matter how much you love your kids you have to continue to work on the relationship that created them or face the consequences. They begin to reclaim some of what they lost and they share their hopes and dreams for their future.

I was blown away by the emotional depth of this story; the realness, the pain, the longing, and yes the healing. It’s not a typical love story, but it’s one a lot of people will identify with because they’ve been where Tony and Amber are. If this book opens the lines of communication for one couple then it’s a success no matter what the sales records say. Ruthie Knox has written a masterpiece in Making It Last and I hope that people will read it and take something away from it; something good, something that will change their lives, something that gives them hope to move forward together.

4.5 Stars