Reviewed by Chris
TITLE: Surfacing
AUTHOR: Daniel Stephens
PUBLISHER: Wild Rose Press
LENGTH: 226 pages
RELEASE DATE: April 27, 2016
BLURB:
Used to luxurious, high-profile city life, Chris’s world is shattered when tragedy takes his husband and young son. Seeking a life free from pain, Chris returns to his grandfather’s cabin on the shores of Wolf Thorn Lake, Maine.
When Chris meets Jake, the earthy young man who resides across the lake, Chris faces his most challenging decision yet. Does he continue his life alone, or does he risk his heart and the potential of love he sees illuminated in Jake’s warm eyes?
A young man running from pain, a rural free spirit with the ability to heal, and a wolf who haunts the shore-line of Wolf Thorn Lake illustrate the endurance of the human heart, the capacity to learn how to love again, and the heart’s ability to restore even the most wounded of men.
REVIEW:
After the tragic loss of both his husband and his son, Chris decides to leave the city and head up to Maine where his grandfather has left him a cabin by Wolf Thorn Lake. Still very much at a loss as to what to do with his life now, he figures he can fix up the cabin that has been left alone for far too long and try to make sense of everything. But while the cabin is much as expected, the town and the people in it are more than a little surprising. Especially the laid-back hippie cook at the local diner, Jake. The connection Chris and Jake share is almost magical, but Chris has no idea if he can handle the idea of loving a new man while still very much grieving the loss of his husband and son.
This book does a very good job of showing the many facets of grief. Nearly two years after the loss of his family you can still clearly see that Chris is suffering, but it is also enough time for me to see that moving on (both geographically, and romantically) is possible for the character. And yet that it still lets Chris struggle with the conflict between wanting this new life in Wof Thorn and with Jake, without it seeming unrealistic or at least melodramatic. That scene where Chris completely loses it, near the end, is very heartbreaking–and yet it is still one of my favorite parts of the story.
There are some things about this story though that I just struggled with despite all that.
One is the oddly out of sync time/seasons in this book.
So…I don’t know if this is a Northeastern thing, or what, but I had a hard time following the timeline of this book because it seemed like we experienced all four seasons in a matter of months and I’m not entirely sure how that happened. You see, here in California (at least in the valley) we have two seasons: rain and fire. Because of this I automatically assume that when there is a freaking snow storm it is like the deepest of winters. Like I should start worrying about snow zombies or something. But I do get that other parts of the country are weird and have snow more than once every fifteen years. So, maybe that is just my problem. But we start the book off in winter (at least the tail end of it, it seems like), then we have spring. And I’m still good with everything up to this point. Then a couple months(?) go by and then it is summer. Which is a bit abrupt, but I guess that seems ok. But then three weeks later we are experiencing fall and I am completely confused. So either more time has passed and I accidentally missed that part of the book…or Maine has like seven months of winter followed by extremely short springs, summers, and autumns. And hey, maybe that is how things work up there. But I wish it had been better fleshed out for us people who are not exactly familiar with how time (doesn’t) work in Maine.
I also had a problem handling the mysticism in this book. Not because I think it was bad or anything, but because my brain just couldn’t get around it for some reason. I think because I went into this story with a ‘contemporary’ mindset, it just did not compute the whole wolf/wise-woman/nature-is-pulling-them-together kind of thing that was going on here. Give me a fantasy or a paranormal and you could sell me that the moon is made of cheesecake….but if I go in thinking contemporary I have a very hard time accepting all this mystical stuff as real. So every time it came up I tended to roll my eyes and hope it was over quickly. This is not so much a problem with the story, but with me–still it did make the book harder for me to enjoy.
This book had a lot of things going for it, but for me it was a harder fit than most. Right off the bat with the 3rd person omniscient point of view, I felt slightly disconnected from the story (and a little confused as to why inanimate objects were experiencing human emotions). While Chris’ heartbreak was real and something I enjoyed watching him work thru, the rest of the book struggled to hold my attention. Since most of the things in this book that were issues are related to personal preference other readers might find this a much easier and friendlier read. As for me…it left me a bit torn between mild appreciation and frustration.
RATING: 
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