Blog Tour: Shades of Morning

About the Book:


Marnie Wittier has life just where she wants it. Quiet. Peaceful. No drama. A long way away from her past. In the privacy of her home, she fills a box with slips of paper, scribbled with her regrets, sins, and sorrows. But that’s nobody else’s business. Her bookstore/coffee shop patrons, her employees, her friends from church—they all think she’s the very model of compassion and kindness.
Then Marnie’s past creeps into her present when her estranged sister dies and makes Marnie guardian of her fifteen-year-old son—a boy Marnie never knew existed. And when Emmit arrives, she discovers he has Down syndrome—and that she’s woefully unprepared to care for him. What’s worse, she has to deal with Taylor Cole, her sister’s attorney, a man Marnie once loved—and abandoned. As Emmit (and Taylor) work their way into her heart, Marnie begins to heal. But when pieces of her dismal past surface again, she must at last face the scripts of paper in her box, all the regrets and sorrows. Can she do it? Or will she run again?


My Review:  I've enjoyed Marlo Schalesky's earlier books (Beyond the Night) and If Tomorrow Never Comes) so I jumped at the chance to read Shades of Morning: A Novel.  Like Schalesky's other books, the ending of this one was not what was expected, though I have to admit I wasn't as fond of the end of this one as I was of the end of Beyond the Night  Still Schalesky  is a wonderful writer and I really enjoyed the rest of the story--and the ending was happy, wrapped up in a bow.  The theme of the book is that God gives us second chances and we shouldn't let regrets rule our lives.