Book Review: It's You by Jane Porter {BookSparks Summer Challenge}

It's You by Jane Porter
Published: June 2, 2015 by Berkley
Goodreads // Amazon
Copy via BookSparks, this did not influence my opinion

In the wake of a tragedy that tore her life down to the foundations, Dr. Alison McAdams has lost her way. So when she’s summoned to Napa to care for her ailing father, she’s not sure she has anything to offer him—or anyone else.

What Ali finds in Northern California wine country is a gift—an opportunity to rest, and distance from her painful memories. Most unexpectedly, she finds people who aren’t afraid of her grief or desperate for her to hurry up and move on.

As Ali becomes part of her father’s community, makes new friends of her own, and hears the stories of a generation who survived the Second World War, she begins to find hope again. In a quest to discover the truth about another woman’s lost love, she sets off on a journey across oceans and deep into history. And in making sense of that long-ago tragedy, Ali is able to put together the broken pieces of her heart and make new choices that are right for her.

“-- I wish I could warp my arms around his stocky neck and give him a hug, and hold him, and hold him until some of the ice inside of me melts. --"

Heartbreakingly honest and tragically poetic, never has there ever been a story regarding the lives of those after Nazi regime falls as gorgeously woven as this one. IT'S YOU was like learning to fly without wings; I fell until I hit the ground but let the snarky and hopeful words of Edie pick me back up again. Like the wind. I adore this book to pieces. This is my first novel by Jane Porter, and I guarantee y’all it is most certainly not going to be my last.

After losing her fiancé in the worst way she could imagine, Alison is wracked with guilt and is drowning in her own hopelessness. She went out for ice cream and came back to find the love of her life hanging from the chandelier in the entry of their home. A year after his demise, she still can’t help to wonder why he would rather be dead than spend the rest of his life with her, and why he didn’t come to her telling her he wasn’t happy. I think he wanted to be happy. Alison now works at the dental practice owned by her late fiancé’s family. She feels like an outsider. When her dad get’s hurt, despite their rocky relationship (only rockier after her mom’s death) and his adamant protest, she flies out to see him. There she not only sees him, but also another member of the nursing home where he resides: Edie.

IT’S YOU, by Jane Porter is fantastic. To put it simply, I picked this book up at eight in the evening, and then put it down-finished- at midnight. If that doesn’t say everything, then I don’t know what does. Porter doesn’t go all heavy on the romance of the main character, Alison, but instead shows the healing process of Alison though the leaning about the Great Love Edie has during World War II. Tales of misunderstanding, bravery, hate, hope, fear, desperation, and love wove Edie’s story into her diaries.

Porter’s writing is absolutely gorgeous. Her ability to form a character, minor or major, is positively lovely. She is able to accurately display a side of history that we, as readers and members of society, don’t often see. Or maybe it’s just me. I don’t see this side of the war a whole lot. And it’s a completely valid side. The resistance. The mockery those they loved faced because they had to hide what they were. The opposition. The German’s who opposed Hitler’s rule and suffered because of it. And good Lord, did she do a lovely (and completely heart-wrenchingly gorgeous job) of pulling at my heartstrings and making me think a little bit. It’s good to think.

In this book, there are two women who are at completely different point in their lives. In this book there are two women who suffered a loss of their first love. In this book there are choices. And choices have to be made it order to live and move on and to be whole. To be a whole person, a mean. To live a happy life. Even if it gets its fair share of the unfair. (hey, that rhymed!) IT’S YOU is about hope and healing. It’s about loss and love. It’s about what to do when all is said and done. It’s about leaning to love again. And I loved every second of it.