When the Smoke Clears by Jewel E. Ann is LIVE. From USA Today bestselling author Jewel E. Ann comes a bittersweet second-chance romance about deferred love, impossible timing, and the courage of choosing happiness after devastating loss. Check out my spoiler-free review and one-click on Kindle Unlimited.
Synopsis:
Everleigh Reichart and William Landry fell hard—and far too fast. Their weeklong romance ended the moment Will, a twenty-nine-year-old firefighter, learned the truth: Everleigh was seventeen. He walked away to protect them both. Destiny had other plans.
Eleven years later, Will is still running into burning buildings, while Everleigh has become a brilliant psychiatrist. When a house fire strands her on his land, their old feelings ignite like patient embers. But she’s desperate to keep concealing the childhood trauma that has shaped her life, and he’s struggling under the weight of his father’s terminal illness. Too soon, the strain snaps their fragile reunion, flinging them farther apart than ever before.
Now Everleigh must face her past to salvage a future with Will…if he can accept that loving her includes the broken parts too. But first, he needs to come and find her—this time by faith, not fate.
Spoiler-free review of When the Smoke Clears
When the Smoke Clears by Jewel E. AnnMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
When the Smoke Clears is the latest standalone in Jewel E. Ann’s From Nowhere series, and this book was heartbreakingly beautiful. Will, who we met in the previous books, finally gets his own story. You can absolutely read this book as a standalone, but do yourself a favor and check out the other books in the series.
I love flawed characters, and Everleigh might be one of Jewel’s most fascinating. She’s a child prodigy-turned-psychiatrist who fell hard for Will, a firefighter, when she was seventeen. Will thought she was older when they first met, and their budding romance ended up in flames.
Eleven years later, Everleigh is a brilliant psychiatrist who has never stopped loving him. She’s strong, complicated, a little odd, and completely unapologetic about who she is. I loved that about her. But underneath all of that brilliance is someone carrying the weight of a painful past. Will. Oh, Will. This man frustrated me at times, but he was dealing with his own emotional baggage. I wanted to hug him and shake him at the same time.
When the Smoke Clears was messy, complicated, emotional, and beautifully human. Jewel managed to break my heart and then slowly put it back together. She has a way of creating perfectly imperfect characters who always seem to get under my skin and stay there. One-click this one.
