SYNOPSIS
The Lives Between Us is about family and love. It’s about desperate people doing what they need to, to save the ones they love.
Grief-stricken reporter, Skylar Kendall, plots revenge on Michigan Sen. Hastings who opposed life-saving stem cell research and therapy. She gains access to Hastings, learning secrets that would launch her career and satisfy her need for retribution… Only, she hadn’t counted on falling in love.
Can she avenge the lives lost to politics at the expense of her new love and friends?
REVIEW
The Lives Between Us is a story that takes the reader on a journey through the rocky romance between two unlikely candidates for “happily ever-after”. What would ever attract a wealthy business man and personal friend to a U.S. Senator to a brash, out-spoken reporter, who is intent on nailing his friend to the wall at every news conference and in every news article that she writes? He needed to find out when he saw her again across the room at a bar, but little did he know the strange and twisted path their relationship would take over the following year as their courtship followed a wild and rocky road, looking for answers and happiness.
From the opening pages, it becomes apparent that the true story is not about the love story between Mark and Skylar, but is about the battle between families in crisis and the choices we must make for the love of our family. The issue of stem-cell, cord-blood cell, adult stem cells, and the laws surrounding the use and research of these cells suddenly sounds harsh and dry on the pages of the newspaper or across the screen of the television, but not so when it comes to the life or death of a loved one. It is from that pathos of these emotions that that the basis of the story whips not only the emotions of the characters on the page, but the readers holding the book, as well.
Teresa Rizzo took the complex issues of stem cells, frozen embryos, IVF, and all the other differentiations of this complex field, along with the complex laws, and wrote two intricate family stories of heart-ache and healing, as they sought answers to difficult life questions.
The lives and the love of Skylar and Mark brought the two families into the same sphere, where they discovered Skylar and Senator Edward Hastings had already met and agreed to disagree on the subject of “Pro-Life” and stem-cell research. Fireworks were sure to erupt again, but they both discovered that they each had the same love of “family first”.
How could they ever disagree so hardily on what it takes to get a family member well again?
Tucked between the storylines, Teresa shared wonderful enlightenment on the subject matter from both of the presented points of view. She took the time to better explain the stance of where each side was coming from and allowed this reader to better understand the arguments and the positions.
It was in the development of the backstory of several of the characters that we were better able to understand the underlying reasons why the characters were so adamant about their stance on the embryos, unborn children, still-born, and their use for research and preservation of life. Life is not simple, nor are our viewpoints on life.
One of the interesting items I enjoyed was the character development within the story of each of her main characters. She allowed her characters to grow and change and allowed life’s circumstances to change them, much as real life changes us. I will allow I was surprised, disappointedly about some of the life decisions a character or two made, but then, was it really just a revealing of the true character? Or is that how life really is?
Teresa Rizzo and THE LIVES BETWEEN US garnered a true FIVE STAR rating from this author.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Theresa Rizzo is a bestselling, award-winning author who writes emotional stories that explore the complexity of relationships and families through real-life trials.
Born and raised in Grosse Pointe, Michigan, she currently lives outside of Boulder, Colorado with her husband of thirty-two years. She’s raised four wonderful children who are now scattered across the country.
Theresa's debut book, He Belongs to Me, won the 2014 National Indie Excellence Award for romance and the 2014 Readers Crown Award for Mainstream Women’s Fiction and was a finalist in the General Fiction Category of The 2013 USA Best Book Awards.
Find Theresa on the web at www.theresarizzo.com, or connect with her on Facebook, twitter or and Goodreads.
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