Overall: 🐢🐢🐢🐢
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Enjoyment:
“‘You’re not nothing.”
Breach by Kelly Sokol
The Story:
The boundary between battlefield and home front blurs. Are there wounds love can heal?
Marleigh Mulcahy grew up in a boxing gym, the daughter of hard-drinking parents who didn’t keep a stable roof overhead. In the cinder-block Box-n-Go, amidst the sweat and funk, she meets EOD specialist Jace Holt, a highly and expensively trained bomb diffuser with three successful deployments behind him. With a heady mix of hope, carelessness, and a ridiculous amount of courage, they begin a family. When Jace returns to active duty, a roadside bomb resurrects ghosts from the couple’s past and threatens the life they’ve built.
An unflinching and timely gaze into the marriage of an enlisted special operator and his wife, Breach is the story of betting it all on love, a couple’s determination to change the trajectory of their lives, and one woman’s promises to the man she loves and the children they’re raising.
What choices will a desperate mother make to keep her family whole?
Key Elements:
Fiction, Family, Life, Struggle, Boxing, Navy, Love, Poverty, Navy Wife, Loss, Against All Odds, Motherhood
Why This Rating?
Kelly Sokol manages to check off so many positive things with this story. From her writing to her plot, Sokol makes you feel attached to Marleigh and Jace and their growing family. Anything they go thru from the very beginning just proves how much hope you have invested in these two and their happiness. Sokol leads these two individuals, who grew up in very damaged households, together and allows them to make better decisions than what they each had. It shows that just because you might have had a rough and broken past, if you strive to make the future better, then nothing is out of reach. The past shapes you, but your will make you who you want to be.
Marleigh is the individual that we are following throughout the entire book. She is a woman who has goals and a plan for her future. If it doesn’t fit into that schedule then it doesn’t matter at the moment. The way that Sokol’s writes this strong woman is fantastic. You can feel the fight to survive that Marleigh is constantly facing and the struggle of getting through day by day just chipping away at this young soul. But even with the pressure of everything, she has such an inner fire to live and make it in the world. And man does the world want to rip her down at some points. Marleigh learns that she can dig even deeper within herself, even when it feels impossible, to make it back up to the light. I know that there would have been many moments where I would have cracked and just wanted to give up, but Mar just keeps going, making it day by day.
One of biggest parts of this book is the fact that Jace is an active bomb specialist for the Navy. With him being an active member, Marleigh and Jace learn to balance life while Jace is gone. He ends up going on multiple tours throughout the book. I think this is one of the hardships that just hit home for me. I know so many individuals that have married a serving military member. They are constantly shifting and moving around. Those who stay are one the home front are alone while the other is on tour. Brief time in between assignments to be with family and create memories together. It is a really hard for anyone who is a part of that. I am grateful that there are families willing to take on that burden for their country. But not just those moments, when the soldiers are home they are trying to find a way to return to civilian life. That alone can be a battle. We see that very clearly when Jace is home. He has to almost relearn how to be back home with everyone. Each time his homecoming happened it chipped a little bit at your heart because you’re happy he’s home, but you know it is going to take a little while to adapt back. Despite all of that though I loved it when he was home with his family! He is such a great dad!
As a whole, this story was great. And in full openness, I did receive an advance copy of this book, but that doesn’t change how much I enjoyed this book. I loved these strong characters and the growth that they went through from their first meeting till the very last pages in the novel. Sokol helped this world come to life with the descriptions and the emotional scenes we experienced. I could smell the boxing gym. The expanse of plains from Nebraska was a living thing in my living room. Each laugh, argument, and cry this couple had was something I got to participate in. I loved it all. When an author brings you into the story with beautiful writing is the what I crave every time I pick up a book. Kelly Sokol pretty much nailed it too! The Holt family became a really family in my world. I still have the wish for the family to both have happiness and heal from the pain they’ve experienced. I don’t even care that they are fictional! I can’t wait for you guys to give this story a shot and to meet the Holt family. Their boys are absolutely charming!
Breach shows that life is truly a boxing match and the strongest will make it too that final bell. Time for the Next Round!
Time to get lost in the next story!
