Within Reach

Within Reach by Sarah Mayberry
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I received this ARC from NetGalley


Within Reach by Sarah Mayberry

Within Reach is a beautifully written book by Sarah Mayberry that looks at people finding love after a tragedy. Angela and Billie are best friends and have been since their days in boarding school. Angela designs jewelry, travels and lives the single life while Billie is a woman who has it all: a wonderful husband, two wonderful kids and a life full of fun. On her thirty-second birthday, Billie suffers a heart attack and dies. Her husband Michael and her two children Eva and Charlie are left to pick up the pieces and find a way to carry on.

Angela spends as much time as possible with Michael and the children, providing support and heling them get through the days immediately after Billie’s death. Ten months later, Angela shows up at Michael’s house and finds him and the children living what she calls a ‘half-live.’ She goes out on a limb and tells him as much and encourages him to go back to work and start living again, that Billie wouldn’t want him to be miserable.

Eva and Charlie are Billie and Michael’s amazing children and both Angela and Michael do everything they can to support the children and get them through their loss. Eva is a whirlwind, much like her mother, and often sees more than the adults do within the story. Angela loves spending time with the children and Michael, it helps her feel like she is doing something to help them all move forward.
What began as a tentative friendship between Angela and Michael grows into something much more. Both are shocked and scared of the feelings that develop between them as time goes on, but in the end they find it’s far more painful to be apart than to wade through their murky feelings and see what they really mean. In the end, they find a love that is real and based on the future, without forgetting Billie and how important she was in both of their lives.

Within Reach had me laughing and crying through and through. The way Angela interacts with Billie and Michael’s children and deals with the harsh realities of their loss is amazing and very human. She isn’t perfect, she makes mistakes as does Michael as they try and understand the new feelings they have for one another. What Sarah Mayberry wrote is a beautiful story of overcoming loss to find what is waiting in the future. I highly recommend it, just make sure you have some tissues nearby…

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