A love story to novels, Erin Bartels’ “The Words Between Us” is also a beautiful story of loss and forgiveness.
Told between two time frames — “Now” and “Then” — “The Words Between Us” tells the story of Robin Windsor, a girl struggling with her true identity.
In the “Now,” her father (a former senator) is facing execution for several murders as well as a number of other charges, and her mother is also in prison for her role in helping cover up his crimes. Robin is living under a pseudonym, trying to keep her small but struggling bookstore afloat.
The “Then” picks up immediately after her parents’ imprisonment when 14-year-old Robin moves to a small town in Michigan to live with her grandmother. As she tries to hide her true identity, she meets Peter Flynt — a fellow teen trying to overcome his own trauma with the sudden death of his mother, a former English teacher.
Robin’s and Peter’s relationship grows over their love of the written word — they share Peter’s mom’s books — until some unfortunate circumstances and misunderstandings occur, leading Robin to run away.
Each timeframe’s storylines blend together beautifully, building Robin’s narrative of overcoming trials while searching for truth and forgiveness. Bartels does a great job of developing very real and very flawed characters.
This is definitely a love story for the written word and books and the struggling bookstore. It reminds us that stories are alive and live forever and bookstores connect us to friends that won’t ever fail you.
But “The Words Between Us” challenges us even more deeply. It deals with struggling that we will only disappoint God (“I wish I was so sure that God looked at me with anything but fathomless disappointment”); we must stop worrying about what others think; dealing with and overcoming loss; if not careful, we can become caught in a prison of our own making; just because something is hard doesn’t mean it isn’t worth fighting for; and we don’t need to doubt God’s ability to rescue us.
While providing us a beautiful story, Bartels is also a beautifully descriptive writer, with passages like “The spine (of the book) crackles and the sweet perfume of time drifts up to my nose. The lines slip under my eyes like a mother duck and her brood slipping down the river.”
This book is a pure delight!
Five stars out of five.
Revell, a division of Baker Publishing Group, provided this complimentary copy for my honest, unbiased review.