Dr. Juliet Ryan is the quality assurance director at Larimar Springs Corporation, a bottled water company based in San Antonio, Texas. She is a hard-core career woman who has fought to get where she is in life. Appearance-obsessed Juliet lives with the knowledge that “ability mattered, but image was everything” and therefore is “training herself to use before she got used.”
She is focused on proving herself worthy and top-notch in a male-dominated world — one that includes her father as the director of the North American Food Safety Institute. Butting heads in their professional lives, as well as their personal, Juliet and her father, Dr. Bennett Ryan, just can’t seem to get along. Like ever.
But their relationship is put to the ultimate test when both personal and professional storms hit their lives. Juliet is thrown into a whirlwind after both personal lost and corporate disaster strike.
Kelli Coates Gilbert tackles many difficult topics in “Where Rivers Part” — trust, forgiveness of others and one’s self, letting go of grudges, the true worth of life, finding proper priorities, finding and accepting true love, and finding the beauty and worth on the inside, not just one’s outer appearance.
She takes a character — Juliet — who honestly isn’t very likable at first, and turns her into a beautiful character you can’t help but root for by the end. Juliet eventually becomes quite relatable because, even though she initially seems “perfect” on the outside, we quickly learn she suffers from flaws like the rest of us.
This book was fun and interesting and fast-paced and kept me wondering what would happen next. The topic of food safety was an interesting subject to read about — one you don't find often in fiction tales. I truly enjoyed reading “Where Rivers Part.”
Five stars out of five.
Revell, a division of Baker Publishing Group, provided this complimentary copy for my honest, unbiased review.
“Where Rivers Part” (a Texas Gold novel) by Kellie Coates Gilbert