Book Review
Waiting on Hope
By T.M. Souders

I’ve had this book on my kindle for quite a while now, and I’ve seen many raves for it on twitter, so I decided to give it a shot. It was a sometimes painful but ultimately beautiful story.
As the book begins, Lexie is standing on her balcony, trying to make herself jump, very much at the edge of committing suicide. Only the fortunate arrival of her best friend, pounding on her door, prevents Lexie from taking the jump.
We learn very early on in the story, that Lexie was raped by her best friend’s husband a couple months before the book opens. She has not spoken of it to anyone, but she is broken and traumatized. When she realizes she is pregnant, as a result of the assault, she drops everything and gets in her car to head home to her parents’ farm. She plans to live there, till she has the baby, and then she will give the child up for adoption and try to go back to her life. But as in real life, things don’t always turn out the way we plan.
The rest of the book deals with Lexie’s healing, everything from a less than compassionate and sympathetic male obstetrician, to a wonderful understanding therapist, to putting her relationships with her parents, brother and high school sweetheart back together and building a new life right there.
This book made me cry several times. Lexie’s journey of recovery is often so painful to read, her emotions and devastation raw and realistic. But it is ultimately a story of love and healing that speaks to the heart of anyone.
My only problem with the story was that everyone in her life seemed to be guilting her over Lexie’s plan to give her child up for adoption. Her mother constantly goes on and on about her grandchild. Her father and sweetheart make their own comments. What Lexie ends up doing I’ll leave for the reader to discover. I loved how it turned out, but I wanted to knock heads together often. It’s a perfectly reasonable thing for a woman to want to give up a child who was conceived from rape, and the way people around her tried to convince Lexie to do something different broke my heart. None of them were walking in her shoes, after all.
But beyond that, the whole book was realistic, painful but triumphant. Lexie is an incredible character, with depth and strength I admired. I rooted for her from word one and rejoiced and cheered in my heart for her successes. The book will live with me for a long time.