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One year ago, I buried my husband.
One year ago, I held his hand and said goodbye.
Now I spend most of my days lost somewhere between trying to remember every smallest detail of our lives, and trying to forget it all. I fill my hours with work until I’m too exhausted to remember him, to feel anything at all.
One year, 365 days—and then one knock at my door changes everything. A letter from him, a last request, a secret will:
My dearest Nadia,
Trust me, my love. One last time, trust me. Sometimes the epilogue to one story is the beginning of another.
Publication date: October 2020
Mature content: yes
Review: I'm on the fence about The Cabin. From a strictly romantic point of view and at first glance, I loved the two love stories in this book (three, if you count Nathan's relationship with his late wife, Lisa). But then I reflected a bit on the whole of the plot and there are a few things that don't really add up.
The plot does have a few inconsistencies, mostly about the past lives of the characters, but that's not the most important thing. What really irked me is that when I looked at Nadia and Adrian's marriage a second time, it sounded like an abusive relationship to me. Not physical abuse, that's for sure, but abuse nevertheless.
Nadia has no friends, no hobbies. She works herself to death and all the rest of her life revolves around Adrian - his needs, his tastes, his work schedule, etc. Then he dies and she is lost. She has zero life of her own. And then we discover that before passing away Adrian has decided that Nadia will not be able to live her life unless he makes the decisions for her. So he sets her up with the only friend we are told he has - Nathan. And in doing that Adrian decides where Nadia will live, what furniture she will have in her house, even what she will be eating in those first few days she moves into the cabin. He isolates her from the rest of the world in a cabin in the middle of the woods - for her own good, supposedly - and the only person she gets to meet is the man Adrian decided will be her next husband, her next love. He wrote Nadia and Nathan's love story in a book before he died, right down to the details. He's controlling her after death as he did in life. Nadia never has a chance to become her own person - she's still Adrian's, even after she supposedly falls in love with Nathan. The author calls this redemption, but I'm not sure I agree.
Overall I loved the general idea of the plot, but the language could be toned down a bit and Adrian's controlling streak needed to be tamed down too to make Lisa's new marriage sound more like love and less like she's fulfilling the orders left by her first husband.
Happy readings!
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