In “One Tuesday Morning,” we met Jamie Bryan, a woman who lost her firefighter husband in the attack on the World Trade Center on 9/11. In this sequel, “Beyond Tuesday Morning,” we see Jamie doing her best to move on with her life without her husband, raising her seven-year-old daughter, Sierra, and volunteering many hours a week at St. Paul’s, the church near the towers that had been set up as a memorial to the fallen. When Jamie immerses herself in her daughter and in her volunteer work, she doesn’t have time to think about Jake, her husband, and she feels that she’s making progress with her grief. But when Aaron, Jake’s former Captain, tells her that he would like to start seeing her romantically, she wonders if she will ever be ready to take that step. It feels like she’s being disloyal to Jake, even though it’s been three years since his passing.
Meanwhile, Clay Michaels has come to New York for training in his field of police detective. You will remember Clay from “One Tuesday Morning” – he is the brother of Eric Michaels, the man Jamie took in, thinking he was Jake. On Clay’s first morning in New York, he is riding the Staten Island ferry when he notices a gang of young men approach an attractive woman sitting alone. She’s obviously terrified, and his police instincts kick in. He and his partner intervene to save her from a threatened rape and murder. She introduces herself as Jamie Bryan, and she and Clay hit it off immediately.
Clay has never felt this way before. Jamie is everything he’s ever looked for in a woman. Jamie is sure that with a man like Clay, she could move forward and have a real future. But then the truth comes out –Clay is Eric’s brother. How can Jamie be involved with the brother of the man she thought was her husband? Every time they had a family reunion, she’d be staring Eric in the face – Jake’s face.
I like Karen Kingsbury’s writing quite a bit and I did enjoy this book, but not as much as I did “One Tuesday Morning.” There were some repetitive passages and it was pretty heavy-handed on the preachy, although I do expect that in a Christian book, but it went on and on a bit in that regard. Additionally, there were chapters from Sierra’s point of view which were written in a Junie B. Jones-type vernacular, which was quite a bit overdone as well. Putting these criticisms aside, it was a good story, a good romance, and a satisfactorily happy ending for both Clay and Jamie, who we came to care about in the first book.
(This book was published in 2004 by Zondervan.)
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