I Run To You Release Day!!

Alyssa Bennet had been living life on autopilot, never taking chances or the time to figure out what she wanted in life. A broken family and lonely childhood had failed to show her the true meaning and depth of what love can be.

But all that changes on her 25th birthday.

Alyssa suddenly realizes that it’s up to her to take charge and choose the direction of her life.

Landon Daniels, Alyssa’s best guy friend is always there for her whenever she needs him. But when life takes a drastic turn with an unexpected diagnosis, her relationship and feelings for Landon become too complicated to face. Alyssa is forced to rely heavily on the only two people she’s ever been able to trust, her best friend Anna and her beloved Nona. As they always have, they help Alyssa sort through the mess that has become her life.

At her time of deepest despair, Alyssa finally begins to learn what true love really means. But her old feelings of inadequacy quickly creep back into her life making her doubt she can ever have happiness.

Will Alyssa be strong enough to face her fears and run toward the only man she’s ever loved, or will she destroy her chance completely?

I wasn’t sure how I felt about this book till I was at the end.  Alyssa started out rather dark and not a character I was going to be able to understand but as the story unfolded I could see what made her so prone to run from situations and people.  This knowledge gave me more of an understanding towards her and I was then invested in her story. 

She had been with her boyfriend for a while, he thought things were going well, but she had never been happy.  She finally breaks it off with him and goes back to live with her Nona (grandmother) and tries to figure out what life is going to entail for her next.  She has her best friend Anna and Landon, but soon the feelings Landon is showing her begins to confuse her and her desire to run again comes out. 

Landon is what she considers a perfect 10 and there is no way he could ever settle for someone like Alyssa but then even her father and mother couldn’t settle having her for a daughter.  She longs to know where her mother is, she thinks about having a relationship with her dad, but Landon keeps pressing her to give him a chance.  When she is given a medical issue that she has to deal with, it will be time for her to accept the answers she has searched for and some of those answers will bring her love and acceptance while others will bring more heart break and confusion.  People in her life are trying to protect her by hiding the truth, she is going to have to be strong enough to accept the answers she is about to find.

I ended up enjoying the book but will admit the beginning was not my favorite part.  As I said I couldn’t get Alyssa, she was just an annoying woman to me that needed to grow up and stop living in the past.  As her story was told, I felt horrible for thinking that about her as I see she was trying to move on, life just wouldn’t let her.  The author did a great job though with the balance of her development, while developing the other characters rather quickly so I was engaged enough to not stop reading.  

The first time Landon and I ever hung out together, a year or so earlier, we pledged our everlasting friendship.

“You’re the only female I know who isn’t crazy,” he’d said. “If I even hang out with someone once, the girls I see act like we’re in a committed relationship and they go nuts. It makes no sense.”

“Yes, women are freaks,” I laughed at him good-naturedly. “Myself included.”

“No. You’re different. That’s why I like hanging out with you. You’re not clingy and needy, and all emotional and whacky.” He rolled his eyes, his cute face morphing into sheer goofiness. “We should be friends. Good friends.”

“I agree. We should be friends. And it helps that you are incredibly ugly, and I’m not attracted to you in the least,” which was mostly true—mostly. So Landon and I easily became very good friends with natural chemistry and easy banter.

He was ridiculously hot with thick brown hair, dark brown eyes, and a perfect athletic body. Even though he was fun, and we spent numerous hours together, Tom and I were dating and neither Landon nor I believed in cheating—ever. I felt completely at ease with him from the moment I first met him, which was unusual for me. We even spent a lot of sober time together when one of us wasn’t working or at school.

Tom never cared because he slept mostly during the day, but I was always up and moving like most of the world, unable to sleep during daylight hours.

Landon jokingly called himself my ‘stand-in boyfriend’ and I was his ‘substitute girlfriend,’ since he never seemed to hang out with a girl for more than one night. However, we knew where we drew the line. Besides Anna, he was someone I could count on and feel comfortable around.

Nobody understood how we could be good friends without hooking up. His nickname for me didn’t help matters.

I’ve been writing for as long as I can remember; journals, poems, and short stories. I always wanted to write a novel and started several over the years, but for some reason I could never see them through to the end. Until Eva came along. I was abandoned as a child, at about the age of 2 or 3 which I strangely never gave a lot of thought to. Then I became a mother. When my youngest child was about 2, I watched him sleeping one night as I often did. But this night, I was gripped by this heart-wrenching realization that he was about the age that I was when my parents left me. Something stirred inside of me, and eventually Eva was born. “Leaving Eva” began as a story of a girl who was heartlessly abandoned, and then her story took on a life of its own. It was no longer the story that I began, and it became something else entirely. I am happy to have finally gotten in touch with my inner Author. She’s always been there lying dormant inside of me, reflecting in other parts of my life. But now she is awake and alive, shining through me every day. I am very fortunate to have a wonderful supportive husband, two beautiful children, and an incredible family. I have a career that is rewarding and challenging and I get to work with amazing, funny, talented people every day. Writing has been an escape, a refuge, and an outlet for me. I feel so lucky to get to channel my energy and my creativity through my writing. I hope that my readers will continue to stay with me through my journey as I grown and evolve. I am so grateful for the support I’ve received and the amazing people that I’ve encountered along the way!

  

 

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