If Tomorrow Never Comes-Marlo Schalesky

If Tomorrow Never Comes
Marlo Schalesky
Multnomah, Mar 17 2009, $12.99
ISBN: 9781601420244

They met as kids and though she came from a stable house headed by a pastor and him from a home in which his mother died early and his father went to prison, they fell in love. Kinna Hollis and Jimmy Henley married and planned to raise a family. She became a nurse and he went into construction work. For the next dozen years they tried to have children, but she was infertile though they tried almost everything.

Their love teeters on the abyss as Kinna has become obsessed and Jimmy feels like a failure. She steals fertility medicine from the hospital she works in as a nurse. However, when he failed to run the machinery to rescue an injured worker, he is fired; when the hospital catches her theft she is fired. Jimmy is depressed when he returns home, but all Kinna wants is his sperm. He walks out on her. Stunned she rescues an elderly woman Thea from the nearby sea and soon that senior meets Jimmy and gives him a dog. As the despair deepens, Thea keeps showing up until an accident at the construction site forces Jimmy and Kinna to look at their relationship before the sea takes back their sand castle dreams.

The story line starts a bit slow as readers struggle to understand the lead couple; Kinna is initially hard to like with her obsessive impulsive behavior and Jimmy has withdrawn fearing failure like his dad. Once Thea enters the plot and keeps showing up with locket in hand at odd moments, the plot takes off as a deep inspirational character study as Kinna learns that sometimes dreams and goals must be dropped. With a strange whimsical twist on the merged themes of God works in mysterious ways but is there for everyone making everything even the impossible possible, Marlo Schalesky provides a strong metaphoric inspirational.

Harriet Klausner