Synopsis

Two coasts. Two strangers.
And a bridge that silently beckons them both.

Katie Connelly has lived in San Francisco all her life. Her late father made his career on the Golden Gate Bridge, and the many stories of how he saved jumpers still haunt her. And now her job assignment is to write about the history of the bridge—a history that includes a secret journal about a promise ring and a love story that may be the answer to her unresolved sorrow.

Meanwhile, Dave Riley, a marketing executive in New York, has sorrows of his own. Grasping at straws after tragedy strikes his family, he decides to follow a daydream that has turned into an obsession: to drive across the Golden Gate Bridge on a motorcycle on the Fourth of July.

Does the bridge somehow mysteriously hold the answers both Katie and Dave are looking for? Or will they find something completely different when they get to the other side?

Review

This is the story of two individuals with ties to the Golden Gate bridge’s construction via family members. It is told from two different viewpoints which was a smidge confusing to me at first, but it did not take long to get into the swing of the characters and their lives.

Kate intrigued me and I found her passion for research interesting. Of course, at one point it becomes an obsession for her when trying to find Patrick O’Riley after discovering his journal in her father’s study.

Dave Riley seems to have it all until he loses everything. I can’t imagine how he dealt with the tragedy that happens and the journey he begins to find himself.

Now you might think that this is a story where Kate and Dave will meet and begin a relationship but it isn’t (ok so that is a little bit of a spoiler) but it isn’t and is rather a journey for each into the past and looking towards the future. It is also about growth and branching out of their current lives and experience more of what life has to offer.

There is a lot of history about the Golden Gate Bridge in this book and I found it all to be very fascinating. I didn’t know a lot about how it was built or even those that might have lost their lives in that pursuit. I am thankful to the author for sharing this information with us.

This book might make you think about your own life and the direction it is heading and if that is where you want it to go or if you need to make a change.

We give this 4 paws up and highly recommend you add it to your TBR list!

Excerpt

Jamesburg, New Jersey

Megan Riley—hair sopping, bath towel clinging—burst into the kitchen, beckoned by the howling smoke alarm. Her eyes darted around the room. No visible fire. No visible husband. Only Angel, their youngest, a petite child who had recently turned five. She stood peacefully beside the toaster admiring the rising smoke, like steam from the geysers they had visited in Yellowstone Park last summer, except today it was dark and sooty.

“Angel! Where’s Daddy?” Megan hollered, pouncing toward the plug. There was no need. The appliance popped on cue, perhaps in surrender, to give up its burnt offering.

“Don’t know, Mom,” Angel answered with an innocent shrug. “But his toast is done.”

Although the toaster may have ceded, the smoke detector was just getting started.

Megan tugged a chair beneath the alarm, balanced on it like a scantily clad circus performer, and fanned one-handed. The clamor did more than ignore her: the half-circle vents molded into the detector’s puck-shaped face seemed to grin down.

Brad, barely sixteen and dark-haired like his father, turned the corner. He halted. His mother, dripping hair, tippy toes, clad in a tenuous towel, was flapping anxiously at the ceiling.

“Now, there’s something you don’t see every day,” he deadpanned to Angel.

Megan ignored him, reaching instead with a single finger on her free hand toward the one button on the blaring contraption that would silence the racket once and for all—and then she would find Dave.

Just another inch and . . . her chair tipped backwards.

Megan screamed.