Blog Tour and Giveaway: Against All Odds: Angie McKeon

by - Wednesday, April 09, 2014

Against All Odds 
Angie McKeon
Genre: Adult Stand-alone Contemporary Romance

Our lives shattered... Our hearts broken... Our souls torn to pieces...

He was my world, my whole life. My reason for breathing. I had a perfect marriage, a baby on the way, and I felt fulfilled—almost invincible. 

Until the day life hit, leaving me broken, vulnerable, and alone. 

She was my life. My ray of hope on the cloudiest day. With her, I thought I had the ultimate safety. A love that would never hurt or betray me. I gave her my heart, my body, and my soul. 

Until she broke me, destroying every dream and illusion I had about life, love, and marriage. 

In our grief, we made a mistake. A mistake I'm not sure we can come back from.

“Look at me, Kylie,” he says.

If I look at him, I’ll die. My heart will crumble, and I won’t make it out of his office. I can’t do it. The pain is unbearable. When I leave here, he’s with her. The thought of him with her, while I’m pining away for him makes me sick.

It destroys me.


“Please, Ky. I need you to look at me. Don’t do this. Don’t play fucking games with me. I need you to look at me now.” 

Just do it. Suck it up.


I turn around and look at him with tears in my eyes and distress smeared across my features like paint on a canvas. My body seeps anguish I can’t hide. I can never hide my heart. My feelings are always written on every seam of my face, every angle of my form. My distress penetrates the air around me, pulling him into my suffering, entangling and entrapping him within the storm that rages in me. I’m broken without him and I’ve been without him for so long that I’ve lost pieces of myself along the way. The jar that holds the last of my heart is about to shatter until nothing is left but shards of the woman I used to be.

“I can’t take this anymore,” I whisper, my voice broken. “We need to talk about us over dinner.”

I can’t give a voice to my thoughts. If nothing changes between now and then, our marriage can’t go on. He’s killing me, and I’m killing him. Together, we’re a car wreck heading straight for a cliff. A cliff that spans a mountain. We are on our way to certain emotional death and this ride’s something I don’t want to be a part of anymore. I want off. 

His eyes pierce mine, and I know he knows what I’m thinking. He looks stunned, and for a split second, I see fear. Cold, fucking fear. He sees everything I need him to see and more. I hope he gets it. I hope he understands that this might be the end of our road. We need to have something to work for, or we have nothing. I love him, but this love hurts. It hurts in a way I would’ve never dreamed it could. 

All rights reserved. Against All Odds © 2014 Copyright, Angie McKeon.





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.
Angie McKeon
Website/Facebook/Twitter/Goodreads

A multi-tasker from birth—and now proudly able to add 'writer' to my resume—I'm a mother, wife and blogger. I love to read, write and drink copious amounts of iced coffee. 

All three aforementioned addictions are detrimental to my sanity 

I have a voracious appetite for dark, painful and twisted reads. I'm enamored with the concept of love and heart break. I believe life is a journey, a tale in its own for each of us. The road to happiness is sometimes paved with stones from hell, or glitters of satisfaction graced from the heavens above. 

In my upcoming debut novel, 'Against All Odds,' I strive to make you feel. I believe any emotion—whether painful or happy—is good. To me, the key to living is to go through life feeling it’s ups and downs. Love is dark and it can be painful but, at the end of the day, it can save the most lost of souls and the most broken of hearts.

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3 comments

  1. I really want to read it. It sounds like a rollercoaster of emotions go on in it

    ReplyDelete
  2. I would love to read this. It's gotten great reviews and I really want to know what happened.

    ReplyDelete