Review of An Unlit Candle by Caren J. Werlinger

This was very well done! I feel like in a couple of years I’ll just be able to say the name ‘Caren Werlinger’ and people will know there is a special story here without even needing to see my review. I will admit I was late to the Caren bandwagon. I always knew she was a good author, but then I would read one of her books and kick myself because I forgot just how good she really was. Well, I’ve learned my lesson over the past few years and now I’m always excited for a new Werlinger book to come out. I’m happy to say that this book was everything I was hoping for and a great sequel to In This Small Spot.

I recently read/reviewed In This Small Spot when Caren announced that the sequel would be coming out soon. In This Small Spot was excellent, but it was also a heartbreaker. I honestly had no idea how Caren would write a sequel. It seemed like it would be a challenging story to write, but boy did Caren knock it out of the park. I believe that readers of In This Small Spot are going to be happy with this book. This book doesn’t make up for all the tears in the first book, and I still needed tissues for this book too, but it was an excellent read. I would highly recommend reading ITSS before you read this book. In my opinion, they feel like two halves of a whole story and while I think anyone would enjoy this book on its own, it’s much more powerful reading the story from the beginning of book one.

This book is broken up into two stories. One is the story about a character you will know from ITSS, her life from young adult to their 70s (I think) and the other story takes place in current times following shortly after the events of ITSS. This choice ended up working really well and I found both storylines very easy to connect to. Because we go back and forth each chapter, sometimes I could not wait to get back to current times, other times I was dying to see what happened in the past. The balance was so well done so that both stories had their chance to shine and as a reader, I cared about both equally.

Since this is a sequel, I’m going to wrap this up and keep things more on the vague side as I would not want to spoil this for anyone who still needs to read In This Small Spot. This book was excellent and I would recommend it to anyone interested in dramatic romances. However, I highly recommend reading In This Small Spot first. These two books are very connected and are so much more powerful having read them together. 4.50 Stars.

A copy was given to me for a review.