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It’s 1970, and Carly’s husband has been killed in Vietnam. She found out she was pregnant soon afterwards, and now, she’s learned that her baby has a fatal heart defect. To know she will have to see her baby, her link to her beloved late husband, die after birth is devastating. Then her brother-in-law suggests something impossible … that she can go to the future and have surgery done on her unborn baby while she’s still pregnant. It sounds crazy. But she thinks back on little clues since when Hunter first came into her and her sister’s lives that suggest he may be telling the truth. And if there’s even a small possibility that what he’s saying is true, she has to take it. For her baby. For her husband.
Carly embarks on a series of actions that will take all the strength and bravery she has in her, more than she knew she had. She has to make a literal leap into the unknown and hope that it will work. And when it gets even more complicated than she planned for or imagined, Carly will know more heartbreak, and more love, than she had known she was capable of feeling.
The Dream Daughter is a tear-jerker. It’s beautiful and engaging and kept me reading. I saw things coming and then had ideas about what would happen and was wrong about some and right about others. Author Diane Chamberlain writes in extra materials at the end of the book that the book isn’t “about time travel”; it’s about a mother’s love. The time travel element simply is the way she explores that essential aspect of the story. The book does remind me of The Time Traveler’s Wife, which obviously shares the time travel motif and has a similar structure and yanks on the heartstrings, but it is clearly its own book (the bonus here is that it is a much cleaner read than Time Traveler’s Wife, which is a romance and has a whole lot of sex).
When I put the book down, having read it in one sitting, I was a bit wrung out but satisfied and pleased with how Chamberlain crafted it and wove the strands of story together. Really lovely.
Rated: Moderate. There are probably fewer than 10 instances of mild and moderate language and one use of strong language.
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