How do you prepare for your own death?

Crossing Oceans by Gina Holmes

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


It's a sad coincidence that I finished reading this book the same day that Elizabeth Edwards died. The heroine of this book had less time than Mrs Edwards to prepare. She had been diagnosed with cancer, and given less than a year to live. Jenny Lucas returned home to the father she had not spoken to in almost six years, and to the ex-boyfriend who didn't know he had fathered a little girl now five years old.

I bought this book because DailyCheapreads.com blogged that the Kindle download was free for a short time. I looked a few days later and the price had returned to $9.59. I tend not to have a great deal of commitment for a book I get for free. If I put out my good money I will almost always hang in there to the bitter end. I almost gave up on Crossing Oceans before the third chapter. Jenny Lucas had already laid out her future, but she remained a bratty child with a chip on her shoulder. I didn't know if I cared enough about Jenny to see how she would end.

But as the other players in her life were introduced I found people that I could care about, especially that little girl Isabella. It became a real tearjerker.

The most intriguing part of the story, the part that offended some readers who wrote reviews on Amazon, was the "Christian" element. I put that in quotes because depending on how you are raised in your faith, we who call ourselves Christians can have very different views of the hereafter. While my view is very different from Jenny's expectation of death, I could see that it gave her a great deal of peace to "know" what to expect. Reading her story gave me a sense of peace, only because Jenny found peace. Jenny prepared Isabella through trial and error until she could die in peace.

I never would have found this book if not for DailyCheapreads. I give it four stars.




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