Waiting for Morning is a story of loss, grief, and finally, redemption. The story begins when Hannah, a wife and mother, is told that a drunk driver has killed her husband and one of her daughters. As she processes what has happened, she loses all faith in God, all but gives up on her surviving daughter, and embarks on a personal mission to eternally punish the man responsible for the accident. Will Hannah’s hard heart be moved by the witness of several Christians that God brings into her life, or will she continue on in her bitterness, losing everything in the process?

I’ve never read anything by Karen Kingsbury, and I was very eager to read this book and discover for myself why she is so popular in the genre of Christian fiction. The story began very powerfully, with a heart-wrenching series of scenes. As a mother of two daughters myself, I wasn’t sure I was even going to be able to continue reading through the more tragic introductions to the characters. Chapter by chapter, though, the horror of what happened seemed to dissolve in the constant repetition about how evil and sinister drunk drivers are. Hannah herself became rather one-dimensional, not just in her single-minded pursuit of justice but as a character who had no depth. Jenny and Brian were much better realized characters, but because their stories were secondary to Hannah’s, we didn’t see much of them apart from how they built up the main plot. Despite how unlikeable Hannah became towards the end of the story, I appreciated that there was nothing false or contrived about her return to her faith. Simply trusting God again didn’t make her anger disappear, and it didn’t magically make her a good mother again. I thought this part of the plot — her struggle with her own flesh, even as she walked in truth — was very honest and real.

Many thanks to Waterbrook Multnomah Publishing for providing me with a free copy of this book to review. All opinions expressed are mine entirely.