This week, we’re looking at a book from yet another new-to-me Lake Union author. This week, we’re looking at Dancing With the Sun by Kay Bratt.
This book was all about a mother’s love for her daughter, and read very much like a love song from a mother to her daughter. Learning later that Bratt actually has two daughters, one hopes that both of them reads this book and realizes just how much their mother truly loves them.The story itself opens with the mother having the difficult duty of telling her daughter that after many years of marriage to the daughter’s father, she is ending the marriage. But the daughter has plans of her own, and wants to take her mother to a beautiful place she found in Yosemite National Park. Except a freak severe rain storm comes up, and they get lost on the way. Now, the battle for survival is on – with neither woman prepared for such a battle.
I wasn’t joking earlier when I said that this book reads like a love song from a mother to a daughter. That is absolutely the main thing you will remember about this book months later. The absolute determination to do whatever it takes to ensure her daughter lives almost screams across every page once the survival part of the story kicks into gear. Yes, the mother battles her own doubts and demons, and has an excellent character arc as a woman of her own right. But the main focus is absolutely the mother/ daughter dynamic, and in that focus this book truly shines. This may have been my first book from Bratt, but it won’t be my last.
And as always, time for the Goodreads/ Amazon version of the review:
Dancing with tears. Wow. This was my first book from this author, who I honestly picked up mostly based on the strength of the other books from her publisher (Lake Union). And yet again, yet another of their authors shows just how good the books they put out are. The book itself is laced with sorrow with a genuine amount of fear of survival once the main plot kicks in, and both the revelations about the past and the perils of the present are well paced. The sense of sorrow never really leaves, even at the end, but it does indeed have a fitting happy ending. I’ve definitely found a new author to get caught up on.