Whose Waves These Are by Amanda Dykes

I don't often post my NetGalley books on my blog, but this one feels like it's worth it. I have been reading a lot of light fiction lately in an effort to catch up on my review books and I have realized that I am not a big fan of heavier reading on my phone, so I read fiction. And when possible I still get those books from the library and then there are deadlines. So I've been frantically reading and getting a little burned out by the lightness of the reading, but I also want to get caught back up. So all that to say, this book was so good. Yes, there's a bit of romance, but the deeper themes throughout the book drew me in. I wanted to know what happened and how redemption occurred. It was just so good. And only a couple more library books and then I will return to some deeper reading after we move.

As I closed this book after reading the last sentence, I sat back and said, "Wow."  This was Amanda Dykes debut novel and I want to know when her next novel will be out. She has written some novellas prior to this, but no other full-length novels. Amanda is described as a "drinker of tea, dweller of redemption, and spinner of hope-filled tales" and I couldn't agree more.

This story flips back and forth from the time Robert Bliss was 18 years old during World War II to the early 2000s when he is lying in a hospital bed and his great-niece comes to visit. The story follows Robert through the next 20 or so years while still occasionally flipping forward to the present-day part of the story, if that makes sense.

It's a story of grief and hope and rocks. It's a story of loss, deep love, and redemption. Robert has a deep grief to work through and he does it by following the instructions left him: "Don't get stuck in the dark, Bob... There's a whole lotta light, go there instead." And that leads to the poem that went world-wide and brought boxes of rocks to the town of Ansel-by-the-Sea.

Annie, his great-niece, is also a bit lost. Her dad is estranged from his Uncle Bob, she feels she has botched her one and only anthropology job and is now pushing numbers in a Chicago office. When GrandBob needs help, she goes and there she meets Jeremiah Fletcher, a strong man with deep secret pain. You know how that ends up, but it is one of the most beautiful stories I have read recently. The romance is limited, but the search for hope and light is not. Jeremiah is a man who is all-in when he's all in, but with high walls otherwise and it's the slow dance of breaking down those walls one piece at a time, not through romance, but through true friendship.

This story pulls you in and makes you want more. You want to know about the rest of the people mentioned in the story, of Ed and Sylvia, of Arthur, of William and Annaliese, of Bess and even Spencer T Ripley. The way Amanda wields words makes the story come alive and I couldn't stop reading, especially at the end when I needed to make sure there would be a happy ending, not just between Annie and Jeremiah, but between two other very important characters as well.

I also thought there was some good advice given in this book. Listen to this paragraph:
"What are you growing? Annie plies the tools of her trade, hoping that the questions will lead to connections. It was what brought her into anthropology in the first place. When she was a painfully shy teenager, she discovered the magic of questions. If she asked the right questions, the other person would talk, and talk, and talk. And she could listen. She fell in love with listening, marveled at the magic of the things she found out, just by asking a few questions. Treasures buried in every conversation"

As you can tell, I thoroughly enjoyed this book and am hoping that there are more books coming from Amanda Dykes. I am not a big fan of novellas, but I might have to go check out at least her novella prequel to this story.

I received this book from Bethany House via NetGalley and was not required to write a positive review. All opinions expressed are my own.