Candice and Jason Woodruff had everything going for them: a strong marriage, the family they’d dreamed of, and successful businesses. When they made their wedding vows, they promised to love each other through infinity and beyond…but Candice doesn’t remember making that vow. Candice doesn’t remember the last eighteen years. 

After a medical emergency, Candice awakens to find herself a married mother of four. She’s surrounded by a loving family of strangers, but Candice struggles to claim an identity while learning to be a wife and mother. 

Candice is no longer the same woman Jason fell in love with all those years ago. Can they learn to love each other in this new reality?

Through Infinity is one woman’s journey as she rediscovers the love of her husband and children. But will that new found love be strong enough to carry them through infinity and beyond… 

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I woke up one day and everything I knew had changed, not just changed, it had disappeared into a clouded ether of tangled thoughts and missing pieces. My life had become a puzzle. Unfortunately, all of the pieces weren't there to put the puzzle back together. 

Candice woke up one day to confusion and memory loss. And unfortunately that meant losing a significant chunk of her adult life and the most important relationships she had developed. Thus begins a process of recovery and rebuilding a life she can't remember and getting to know her new family and coming to terms with some new limitations. 

It is a journey for her to learn bits of her past through other means while trying to reconnect to the most important people in her life...her husband and four children. I enjoyed the process and methods they used to try to develop new understanding of each other and relationships. The kids are all so different, talented, and loving. It is a bit more challenging to try to rebuild the intimacy lost between a husband a wife. Jason is amazing--such a loving, devoted, patient, tender, and protective man. But she has a lot of emotional baggage to get through. And they truly have no choice but to begin again as the people they are now.

"Well, I did get you to fall in love with me once, despite your attempts to play hard to get...I'm pretty confident it could happen again."

Can you reestablish connections of the heart even if your mind won't let you remember loving them?

This is not a typical hot, angsty,  romance novel . It is more of an emotional journey for a woman and her family...but it is a love story. It is told in Candice's point of view so we understand her confusion, fears, anxiety, and feelings. Some is told in present day recollections and some in previous journal entries as she tries to reconcile who she was with who she is.  She is a woman torn between a missing past, life in the present, and an unsure future. The characters have depth, are likable, and interesting. Parts of it are a slice of a normal, crazy family life but living with the effects of this huge change. And how they deal with it, proves what they are made of. I fell for all of the members of this family and they had me smiling more than sad.  Jason is completely and utterly swoonworthy.  It has some really sweet and happy moments that balance out the tragic situation. It is a heartfelt, humorous, and inspirational  story of love, family, and hope. There will be a holiday novella Thanks for the Memories coming soon and Jason's point of view in the companion novel & Beyond. 

My life began the day I died … Wait, let me rephrase, my life as I know it began five days after I died.

Candice Woodruff wakes up in a hospital with no memory of the previous seventeen years. The last thing she remembers is being 23, and now she’s 40, married with 4 children. She has no memory of of the people she lives with or works with. Disoriented, overwhelmed, she struggles to balance the person she thinks she is with the person she thinks she is supposed to be. 

Reading amnesia based stories feels like both a puzzle and a suspense as the narrator navigates learning about who they are, what they are, and determining what they are supposed to do next. Candace faces all these challenges. Waking up with no memory of one’s husband and children brings a certain amount of disorientation that can’t help to spill out to readers. But despite the challenges of memory loss, Candace’s personality isn’t lost and she often turns to humor to defuse some of the uncomfortable situations that arise.

Jason was such a perfect husband. Not perfect in that he has no negative emotions, but perfect in that he takes the vows he exchanged seriously, and recognizes that his family has entered one of those “for worse” periods. This was not easy on any member of the family, and Jason and the kids give yet another aspect to Candace’s memory loss.

Each of their children had such different personalities, and I loved each one. The addition of the children added another level to Candace’s recovery, and watching those relationships rebuild was a big part of this story. There was one thread from one of the daughters that I had wished was fleshed out further, but for the most part I loved the depth the kids brought to the story.

There were some moments where I was confused. Characters referenced that I couldn’t remember their connection, events referenced that were never resolved, and a fourth wall break that caught me off guard in it’s singularity. There were also times when I felt like I was being told the story rather than watching it unfold through the characters’ eyes. While Candace narrates the entire story, it often read as a retelling of the events rather than either a memory or a real time account.

But for the most part, this was a great read. It was emotional, family oriented, and honest about the upheaval that losing memories brings to one’s life. There were plenty of light moments to balance out the heavy. And the family at the center of the story were fun to read, fun to watch, and fun to get to know.

I was gifted a copy in exchange for an honest review.

Free Holiday Novella Thanks for the Memories will be revealed through the upcoming blog tour Dec. 29 to Jan. 9 and then will be released as a full novella

Libby Austin Website/Facebook/Twitter

One day some words came to mind, so I wrote them down. Soon the words became sentences, which formed paragraphs, which, in turn, formed chapters. Before long, those words had become a book.

When I'm not reading or writing, I'm a wife, mother, and business owner. I've lived on the Gulf, East, and West Coasts, but as a born and raised Southern girl, my favorite will always be the Gulf Coast. There's just no place like home...