Waters Fall - Becky Doughty

Jake and Nora do not have a perfect marriage; Nora wants Jake to step it up in providing for their family, and Jake feels discouraged by Nora's lack of respect and his own failure to get his business off the ground.  However, they're trying to make it work and sticking together, until the night Jake turns up drunk after 10 years of sobriety, and alludes to an incident with a waitress.  Everything begins to spiral down from there on both their parts, until they're not sure there's any common ground left to stand on.  Nor are they sure they want to find any.

This is not an easy book to read.  While it's vulnerable, and honest, and probably far too realistic, Jake and Nora each choose paths that you would not expect to read about in detail in a Christian fiction book.  With that fair warning, the book does an admirable job of drawing each of them through their own choices and failures until they realize what has happened to them, and they get to the place where they need to decide whether to continue to lean on themselves, each other, or God, and to see where that final choice leads them. I like that the plot took the characters to counseling, but showed that counseling is not a fix-all.  They had to work through their own messes and decide to be fixed.

I'm not sure how to rate this book; it was well-written, but I don't know that there are many folks I would recommend it to, due to detailed affair plot line.  True grace requires a real fall, and there is plenty of both in this book. I'll give it 3 stars - it's rare to find a book that delves into the sinful choices we make with no excuses, but I fear there's a line that this book may have crossed to get there.

You can find Waters Fall HERE.
You can find the author's website HERE.

I received a copy of this e-book from the publisher, via NetGalley, in exchange for my honest review.