I'll Settle For Love review

I’ll Settle for Love by Michelle Lynn Brown

Contemporary Inspirational Family Fiction

November, 2013

$2.99

$7.99

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About the Book:

Leanne grew up under the steady trickle of the harsh and belittling words of her critical mother, in the shadow of her sisters’ perfection, and under the weight of a dark secret. With her self-confidence all but eroded, and her head hanging down, she is surprised when Mike McKinley notices her. With every kind word, Mike erases a little pain from her past, and for the first time, she feels as if she is standing on firm ground. But seven years into their marriage, she realizes that her foundation is lying on shallow ground. As their marriage and family begin to settle, the cracks appear.

Mike McKinley is a fixer. From cars to people, he is the guy to go to when you have something that needs repair. But when their oldest daughter is diagnosed with an autism spectrum disorder, he is sent into a tail spin. As his daughter is struggling to stay afloat in her world, and his wife is drowning in her insecurities, Mike feels helpless to do anything to save them.

A wide chasm separates their marriage, and storms threaten to send them crashing through the pit. Can Leanne fight her past, her insecurities and her failing faith to discover the difference between settling for the storm, and striving for the rainbow that comes after?

Review:

As the summary says, two people fall in love and marry. One of them wears despair so well under a veneer of the perfect wife no one knows she’s suffering, and the other has gotten so good at seeing what he wants to see that he refuses to remove his rose-colored glasses to understand why his wife spends an inordinate amount of time protecting their daughter from life.

Unlike a traditional romance, I’ll Settle for Love is about dealing with what comes after the wedding. Real life takes work, and while Leanne and Mike do have a great relationship and are making it as a family in a middle class world, Leanne’s past is slowly creeping up on her. Mike continues to gloss over the reasons Leanne refuses to spend time with her parents and made him vow to never, ever allow their children unsupervised visits at their home. His own parents more than make up any slack, and it never occurs to Mike that there’s an obvious problem. In fact, any problem that can’t be revealed through a mechanical diagnosis and fixed with a wrench escapes his happy-go-lucky viewpoint. When Leanne’s stepfather dies, the bough breaks and it takes more tears, more loss, and a lot of faith to undo a life of parental damage and remake the family according to God’s plan.

This is in many ways a difficult story, but told with empathetic and sympathetic characters. The end is not completely obvious, and readers will enjoy making their way through the twists. Adult themes make me suggest parental oversight for younger than tenth-grade readers.

About the Author:
When Michelle Lynn Brown was a teenager, her mother used to take her to used books stores at least once a month. It was there she fell in love with the written word. As a writer, she uses this passion to share with others the joy of having a personal and intimate relationship with Christ.

She is a housewife, mother of three, military spouse, writer, blogger, hopeless romantic, and a cuddly lap for one very large cat. She was born in Dayton, Ohio, but raised in El Paso, Texas. And since she married her husband, the military has blessed her with the opportunity to live in many locations, from Germany to Pennsylvania, where she now resides.