TullyandKate. All Kristin Hannah fans know TullyandKate. Kristin Hannah’s Firefly Lane is the best friendship story ever told. I remember reading in 2009 and just crying and sobbing after I turned the last page. Making the reader care and invest in the characters is the mark of a best selling author. Nobody does it like Hannah. Firefly Lane, is, and always will be, my answer to What is your favorite book?
Imagine my excitement a few months back seeing on Facebook that Hannah wrote the sequel. What happened to TullyandKate? I couldn’t wait to find out. I reposted her posts and talked with friends and blogged about the sequel coming out. I would read it the first day it hit Amazon.
Imagine my chagrin and surprise when I got a text from a friend yesterday telling me that she had just finished both Firefly Lane and the sequel, Fly Away, and could I recommend more by the same author. What? Impossible. I’m totally sure I pre-ordered Fly Away and would have it on the day it came out on my Kindle. I searched my Kindle on both my phone and iPad. Not there. This can’t be. I went to Amazon. It was released April 22. I never pre-ordered it. I downloaded it before I even answered my friend back.
I started it last night and read past midnight. Today I hurried through my chores and sat down and finished it. My reaction? Numb. Amazed. My usual reaction after reading any of Hannah’s books. Nobody brings home the importance of a child having a mother that loves and cares for them as Hannah does in this incredible tale of the fate of TullyandKate.
When a broken mother, who herself is the daughter of a broken mother, has a child, the damage is insurmountable. In Firefly Lane you never know Tully’s ridiculous mother’s backstory and you can’t imagine how she could just keep leaving Tully. In Fly Away it all comes to fruition. We all know that if mother’s and children get caught in that cycle, it seems hopeless. It is good people, people able to give and receive love, that step in and break that cycle and offer hope in a hopeless situation.
One sentence, that will stick in my heart forever, sums it all up when Kate says to Tully:
Ha. You are more afraid of love than any person I’ve ever met. It’s why you keep testing people and pushing them away. Open your eyes.
The most important thing in life is to be able to give and receive love. To be able to put your heart out there and risk having it broken. To know you can love and are loved unconditionally. For a child to grow up and form long lasting relationships, it must be modeled by a parent. If not a parent, then someone who enters the child’s life and cares enough to stay there. Kristin Hannah is a master at telling this story in both Firefly Lane and Fly Away. If you are a mom or a caregiver of children, these are “must reads”. If you are an adult that missed that mother-child connection along the way, this is a “super-must read”.
In the story of TullyandKate, Hannah offers up love, hope, and deep, deep forgiveness in heaping helpings. Download them today and grab your share.
And so, as another day goes by, I close the cover and come away with renewed hope that even the most damaged among us have shot at real love, and…I have written.
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