Beauty on the Backroads

Stories of grace for life's unexpected turns

Archives for February 2015

All good things must come to an end: Review of Sabotaged by Dani Pettrey {plus giveaway!}

Sigh.

I knew this day was coming, the day we’d bid farewell to the McKenna family and this crazy amazing series of romantic suspense books by Dani Pettrey. Sabotaged, the fifth and final book in the series, releases this month, and it’s just as heart-pumping as the rest. (Disclaimer: I received a free copy of the book from the author in exchange for my review.)

SabotagedSM1This book centers around the Iditarod and a missing dog sled driver who is also the uncle of Kirra, a local veterinarian who grew up around the McKenna family. Reef, a McKenna sibling with a sketchy and troubled past, is working search-and-rescue with Kirra when her uncle goes off course. They’re then thrust into a mystery that has them traveling to points along the race path and fearing for their lives.

Each of five books follows one of the McKenna siblings and a crime/mystery they find themselves involved in solving. If you want to catch up and start from the beginning, you can. You could read each book separately but the background helps, I think.

Here’s the order, with links to my reviews:

Submerged. (Sadly, I didn’t actually review this one, but it hooked me enough to want to read and review the books that followed!)

Shattered.

Stranded.

Silenced.

Sabotaged.

Pettrey’s books are so well-written I find myself wanting to hang out in Alaska, no matter the cold, and re-read the whole series (a rare act on my part). They’re full of action, suspense, romance and deep truths. Now that the series has ended, I’ve been thinking about which story or character was my favorite and I have a hard time choosing. It’s a toss-up between Submerged, which introduced the series with Cole and Bailey, and Stranded, which focused on Gage and Darcy.

Overall, these stories are like a Nancy Drew/Hardy Boys mash-up for grown-ups if those main characters were related and each had love interests.

I’m sad to see this series end but thrilled and excited about the next series Pettrey is working on. It’s set on the East Coast and will revolve around the Chesapeake Bay area.

But you know what makes the ending of a series better? A fun giveaway! Click the picture below to enter the Heart of Adventure sweepstakes. Prizes include a gift certificate to Hotels.com, a donation to an animal shelter or veterinarian, and a sweetheart survival kit (chocolate included!). You can find everything you need to know about the giveaway here. The contest runs through Feb. 22, so head on over and enter!

Enter the HEART OF ADVENTURE Sweepstakes from Author Dani Pettrey!
And if you want to get a glimpse of what Pettrey’s stories are like, check out her amazing Pinterest boards for each book. If that doesn’t get you interested in an Alaskan adventure, nothing will!

When the path to 'whole' takes an unexpected turn

I will confess to having high expectations and a buoyant hope when I began the year focusing on the word “whole.” ow_whole

After all, it sounds so good, this idea that after years and years of feeling broken and worn down that maybe this would be the year some of those things could be mended and repaired, that the areas I’ve felt were lacking would somehow find completion.

We are one month into the year, and I am now discovering that this journey to becoming whole is going to be a lot harder than I thought. And sometimes it feels like this:

Why wasn’t she ready to fully release all the pent-up sorrow and pain? Because she feared if she fully acknowledged what she’d been holding inside for so long, it would overwhelm her, flood her, and she’d break. She wasn’t strong enough. She was getting by, but healing took work, courage, strength she didn’t have. — Sabotaged by Dani Pettrey, p. 166

But, I’m also discovering that just because something is difficult doesn’t mean it’s bad. In fact, it might make it that much better than if it were easy.

Tom Butler | Creative Commons | via unsplash

Tom Butler | Creative Commons | via unsplash

I still have hopes for transformation this year. I’m taking positive steps toward wholeness, like counseling and medication and acknowledging my needs and grieving losses. But on the way forward, I’m finding that I have to look back. And sometimes in looking back, old hurts resurface, and wounds I thought were healed prove that they were only temporarily numbed.

As I’ve sought “whole” I’ve stumbled onto a lot of “broken.” And I’m seeing that this will be the first step in my healing–to break again. Not as a consequence of poor decisions but as an act of healing.

Sometimes on the road to healing, you must reopen an old wound. It will hurt again, maybe as much as or more than it did when it was first inflicted, but as you reconnect with and embrace the healing process, it will begin to hurt less. … That’s the only way it can heal. — Secrets of a Charmed Life by Susan Meissner, p. 318

For the deepest wounds I’ve suffered, I realize I’ve merely done the barest amount of work to survive. I thought I had healed, but I only covered them up. Like a broken bone improperly set, I haven’t healed the right way and so I must break again so that I can restore full function to the broken parts.

It’s terrible. Sometimes.

It hurts. But it’s not pointless.

And though it’s early in the process I can already feel the difference in the healing.

I covered over my hurts, my heart, my feelings which kept the bad things from hurting but also held some of them in. And it kept the good things from penetrating the barrier.

Sometimes, when you’re broken, light shines through the cracks. And the pieces you thought were holding you together get rearranged to make something else.

I was so moved by this song and video when a friend blogged about this idea of being shattered. I might have to add it to my list of theme music for the year. I’m also now totally obsessed with this violinist.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=49tpIMDy9BE]
My pain and sorrows have festered in the darkness, and it’s time to let the light in.

But light hurts sometimes, too. When you’ve been in darkness, light has a way of shocking your sense of sight. Blinding almost.

It’s the same with the kind of light that penetrates the darkness in your soul. One of the hardest things about my therapy sessions is when my counselor says life-affirming things to me. Things like “You are strong and brave” and “You are worth it.”

Those words sneak through the cracks and light up the darkness and even when I try to push them away, they settle in. And push the cracks open a little more.

I’m no gardener so I don’t know what kinds of things thrive in the darkness, but I know that my heart is not one of them.

Leon Ephraïm | Creative Commons | via unsplash

Leon Ephraïm | Creative Commons | via unsplash

I need light.

And sometimes the light needs an opening.

And sometimes the opening has to come through a crack or a break.

Falling, breaking, failing–it all used to scare me because I thought it meant the end.

But I think that’s wrong.

More often than not, the breaking is just the beginning.

Are you pursuing a OneWord this year? How have you seen it working in your life?

For more information on the OneWord365 movement, visit oneword365.com.