Genre: Adult Stand-alone Contemporary Romance

How do you hold on to the love of your life when all you feel is pain? How can you move past tragedy when all you do is continue to hurt each other? 

Against All Odds is one of the most emotionally heartbreaking books I have read in a long time. 

Kylie and Conner had been high school sweethearts, the perfect couple. Loving each other, starting a family, and the anticipation of forever was all they were looking for. After tragedy strikes, Kylie and Conner lose the magic that made up their perfect relationship. Their happiness was gone, and neither could see through the grief the lived in. 

I know it's illogical and stupid, but without Cooper, I can't live. We share a reckless, toxic love that feeds the brokenness in me, in us. Our love is an addiction. A love that I won't ever consider living without.

Watching the bitterness that had crept in to Kylie and Connor’s marriage in the time between the prologue and first chapter was rough. Kylie kept talking about how much she couldn’t live without him, how much she still loved him, but all of her actions (and his towards her) screamed the opposite. There was so much hurt and brokenness that I didn’t see how they could work their way out of it. But hidden in the hurt there were little bits of hope, however dim, and I held on waiting for those glimpses of light in all the dark.

Once the heavy part of the story was laid down, the journey past the worst of the pain begins. Again, I wasn’t sure how they would be able to heal their relationship. Lines had been drawn and crossed and it took a pretty big wake-up call for things to look like there might be a chance. It hurt to read much of this, and I often found myself wiping my cheeks with my sleeves when I didn’t want to get up for a tissue. I should have just kept the darn box next to me the whole time.

We've gotten ourselves in a pattern of disfunction and climbing out isn't going to be easy. Things have been done that have belt scars. But even with all of that I hold tight to the fact that we share something special.

Against All Odds had the whole grieving process laid out in the extreme, and the damage caused to one marriage was impossibly brutal. But the discoveries made along the way point to the ability of a marriage to survive despite having every stone thrown at it. I am usually a one book at a time reader, but this one was so hard to read I took a break part way through to clear my head. It was emotional, dark, and full of pain. But it was also a healing process, with bumps along the way. Kylie and Cooper had to heal as individuals before they could even think about fixing their marriage, and they way they tried to heal themselves almost made rebuilding their marriage impossible. The writing was spot-on, creating such thick emotion that I felt like I had to finish the book, I had to learn how Kylie and Cooper faced their future in order to be able to let go of the emotion the book stirred up. 

Thanks to Angie McKeon for providing me with a complimentary copy in return for an honest review.