“This hole in my heart is in the shape of you and no one else can fit.” – Jeanette Winterson
Cole Grayson’s life is a lie: the celebrity, the wife, the unborn child. All of these things are the pretense of perfection, the façade that reflects to the world a distorted reality and misrepresents the truth that five years earlier, Cole’s true dreams and desires went up in smoke, and his existence is now merely an inadequate substitute for living.
Five years earlier, two seventeen-year-old boys, Cole and Jake Walker, fell in love not only with each other but with a dream of pop-stardom, a dream of making it together to the big time. It was a dream cut short when Jake went missing and is presumed dead after a house fire from which Cole was told there was no hope Jake might’ve escaped.
It’s now five years later and Cole Grayson’s voice and music have brought him everything he and Jake had ever wanted—everything except the truth and the joy that ought to have come along with it, everything that ought to have belonged to Jake because these were Jake’s dreams. The wealth and fame are nothing more than a sorry substitute and pretense for the happiness that only Jake could give Cole. But sometimes the substitute for the real thing is the best you can hope for when everything else can only pale in comparison.
And sometimes finding that substitute is less coincidence than it is synchronicity because that person exists for a very specific reason, and that person is the one who will bring order from the chaos that fate sometimes sees fit to make you suffer through in order for you to recognize the miracle of the second chance you’ve been given.
Singing Alone is a story of redemption and of survival. It is a story of the strength and courage to survive in spite of the pain that living means. I loved it, plain and simple; so much so that I read it twice because the emotional pull was strong enough, and the characters and writing seductive enough that I wasn’t ready for the story to end. I’d have loved to have seen this one expanded a bit to show some of the events of the in between years, but that didn’t diminish how much I loved what I got.
Buy Singing Alone HERE.
Lisa, thank you again for a wonderful review! Your site is becoming a treasure chest of happiness for me. I especially love the quotes you begin the reviews with — they are, in a nutshell, exactly what I’m trying to convey with the stories.
I’m seeing a returning comment on length, and while I can’t promise the next releases I have slotted with JMS Books will be much longer — they, like “Singing Alone” and “Melting Wax,” remain within the short story range — I can tell you my current project is shaping up to be quite a bit lengthier. (Of course, that means it takes longer to finish as well, but that’s to be expected, I suppose.) Also, there’s always the chance I’ll return to detail Jake’s story at some point — I still have questions about him :).
Again, thank you for the beautiful review! You’ve made my day.
Smiles,
Jennifer
Hi again, Jennifer!
Let me tell you how much I loved Singing Alone. Sooooo much. :-D
I’d love to see Jake’s story, to see how he survived during those five years, and how he came to the decision to stay gone once he’d been pronounced dead, especially how that affected him when he was still so in love with Cole.
I look forward to your future releases. I’ll definitely be looking for them.
And the quotes…I just got on that kick recently, for some odd reason. Sometimes some of the fun of writing a review for me is searching for and finding the perfect quote that sums up concisely, exactly what the book meant to me. I kind of got stuck in that groove and now don’t know how to get out of it. ;-)
Warmest regards,
Lisa