200 Letters, by Amy Watkins
My review: ★★★
This book is a story of tumultuous relationships, written from the heart. Ethan and Angela are both getting out of bad marriages when they meet and fall in love. They’re both still tangled with their ex’s, though, and those people are crazy. In fact, many of the people in this book are crazy! This is really the story of Ethan and Angela trying to sort out what on Earth is going on with all of that craziness, and whether they can trust each other. Along the way, they use the Bible and prayer to guide their thoughts and decisions.
My biggest complaint about this book is that it needs some serious professional editing. It has a lot of spelling, grammar and punctuation mistakes. I get that spoken conversations are going to be in informal jargon and style with different grammar, but this goes beyond that. Also, this may just be me, but the characters refer to their own sexual acts with the F word too many times for my liking, and describe them in ways that are a little more crude than my taste. This is minor, but I also don’t really care for the large print format. At 8×10 I can’t hold the book in one hand.
Aside from that, it’s an enjoyable story. The people are very relatable and their reactions are realistic. The ending is believable and satisfying. My favorite thing about the book is that it takes you inside a slice of life for black people in today’s America. The theological reasoning is also very reasonable (though I don’t feel nearly as conflicted about extramarital relations as the characters in this book do, but to each their own).
