✍🏻 Professor Romance’s 5 ⭐️ Review: Catherine Cowles’s Beautifully Broken Redemption ✍🏻

Overall Grade: ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️

“I couldn’t describe it any other way than to say it felt like coming home.”

Catherine Cowles has written a gorgeous new story in Beautifully Broken Redemption. It suggests that we must become vulnerable in order to trust and love again after past hurts. This story, thankfully, takes us back to Cowles’s eponymous Sutter Lake. It follows Anna, a manager of Kennedy’s (Cain’s Kennedy) Hope House, the shelter for victims of domestic abuse. Anna’s superpower is caring for the people of the shelter, as well as her friends. However, she struggles to accept any assistance from other people. The past has taught her to be distrustful of people. It’s easier for her to give and difficult for her to take. When her sister dies suddenly, she is tasked with guardianship over her nephew and niece. Her parents threaten to take custody of them, and Anna will not allow it. Mason, the hero of this story, is an acquaintance, one whom Anna has felt a pull to. She decidedly ignores it, at least until the moment when she must make a huge decision to protect her nephew and niece. Mason turns out to be the guy to help. Unfortunately, danger lurks around the corner and threatens Mason and Anna’s happy ending. 

From the moment I began Beautifully Broken Redemption, I knew that I was going to love Cowles’s story. It has all the qualities of her storytelling: a broken H or h, high emotional walls that must tumble through an extreme soulful love, some danger that threatens the happiness of the H and h, and a gorgeous happily-ever-after. Anna and Mason’s story is all of those. 

Mason is a protector; he’s compassionate and insightful. The love he feels for Anna saves her from herself. Anna is a stalwart, a champion for people, but she struggles to champion for herself. Mason shows her how to let go of the guilt of her past so that she can relish living in the moment through his immense love for her. It doesn’t take long for these two to acknowledge their feelings. The complications of their journey truly come from outside forces, not their acceptance of their feelings for each other. I think when you have a heroine with a complicated past such as Anna’s it’s important to give that heroine the love of a lifetime. And Cowles writes this well. While Mason and Anna have a few struggles, specifically with issues around trust, the outside forces cause the greater strife of Beautifully Broken Redemption. Cowles deftly uses their love affair to undermine the bigger tragedies of this story. Like her other books, the story is fluid, and Cowles’s careful characterization of Mason and Anna keeps the reader engaged in the story. 

Catherine Cowles’s Beautifully Broken Redemption is the story you need right now especially if you love two fractured people finding big beautiful love in the face of danger. Every turn of the page of this book is an alert, a suggestion that you NEED Catherine Cowles’s stories in your life. 

In love and romance, 

Professor A