About the Book
When Quinn Langston’s best friend unexpectedly passes away, Quinn embraces Brooke’s three-year-old daughter Lily and elderly grandmother Margaret as the family she’s always wanted. She’ll do whatever it takes to help them heal, but she didn’t anticipate Lily’s biological father would be part of the plan. Margaret is old-fashioned, though, and she has no compunction about finding a way to reach Lily’s dad, a sperm donor. After all, he’s a blood relative, and she believes family should raise family.
Zack Bradley doesn’t know what to expect when he finds out he has a child. Sperm donors don’t usually get to meet their…well, he’s not sure what to call Lily yet, but he’s certain he wants to get to know her. There’s just one of problem: he’s about to move to Seattle with his wife, Jessica, who’s undergone multiple infertility treatments, desperately wants a family of her own and can’t stand the idea of Zack playing daddy to another woman’s child.
Together, they’ll all learn that the human heart is infinitely expandable and there are many different roads to family.
My Review
I have become fascinated that the conversation of using a sperm donor is becoming more prevalent in the fiction space, so when I read this synopsis I knew I wanted to read it. My biological father is also a sperm donor, and learning about different situations and experiences and hearing more and more personal stories has been really helpful to me over the years, so I enjoy I can now turn to books to read a new conversation also. This particular story really revolves around the gray area of being a sperm donor, and to be honest made me uncomfortable more times than once reading how Zack took to learning he had fathered a child. I had strong opinions when I finished this one and it was definitely a story that made me want to talk to more people about the characters and get their feedback and thoughts on what is still a not much-talked about subject.
Each character was so well written, and I especially enjoyed Quinn and felt a strong pull toward her. Grieving, trying to navigate a sticky family situation while not being a part of her late friend’s family, balancing her own career and life, made her extremely likeable and easy to root for. Zack’s situation was difficult to read – from him wanting to be involved in Lily’s life to his marital problems – but also very real. While I didn’t agree with all the decisions each character made between the pages, the story also read as very realistic and life is messy and complicated. People make mistakes and often the more interesting parts of life is what happens after those mistakes and the next choices someone makes. I highly recommend reading this one for a dose of reality that would make you question what you would do in the situations presented.
5 stars
