Twenty-nine-year-old Jade Jessup is jobless, homeless, and owns little more than the fancy finance executive wardrobe she wore before she found out her fiancé and his father (her boss) were using her client’s money to finance their extravagant lifestyles through a giant Ponzi scheme.
Jade gets a shot at redemption when Berenice “Benny” Alderidge and her foster son, handsome playboy Bridger Rosenblum, invite her to join them on their roadtrip down Route 66, following Benny’s trip close to seventy years earlier.
The story starts with a Prologue which, honestly, was a little confusing. It’s one of those prologues that turns out to be from somewhere in the middle of the story, but it took a while to work out it was the future.
The story then moves between three timelines: Jade’s present story (told in first person present tense), Jades’s past story (also told in first person), and Benny’s past story (told in first person past tense). I enjoy stories told in first person, but I know not everyone does.
The Prologue, combined with the three timelines, made the story a little hard for me to follow at first.
Perhaps I should have read the book description …
The book description makes it quite clear there are three stories in this novel. However, I did work out the present journey was echoing the past—Benny’s original road trip to Hollywood with the man she later married, and Jade’s less-happy road trip as a child, when she was kidnapped by her father. As such, the time shifts were a clever way of sharing the information and showing the progression of the three stories.
Once I got into the flow of the story, I loved it.
Jade, Benny, and Bridger all had their own emotional journeys. I was fascinated by Bridger’s backstory—I hadn’t known about the Samoan adoption scandal before, and it’s horrible to think of all the people hurt through the lies. I love it when I read a novel and learn something new like this.
Bridger’s backstory was fascinating and tragic, but it came out fairly easily and naturally through the story. Jade’s backstory was fascinating and tragic in a different way, but was far harder to uncover, even though Jade was the main point of view character. It’s a testament to Janine Rosch’s strong writing that it never felt like Jade was hiding information from the reader, even though there were some big surprises in her story.
The writing was excellent, and while the novels wasn’t overtly Christian (in that there was no on-the-page prayers or church services), the story had definite Christian themes. And for the romance lovers out there, there is also a romance subplot …
Recommended for fans of dual (or triple) timeline fiction who don’t mind first person present tense.
Thanks to Revell Books and NetGalley for providing a free ebook for review.
About Janine Rosche
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About The Road Before Us
How far would you go to fix the mistakes you’ve made and regain the trust you lost? For Jade Jessup, the answer is 2,448 miles. Once one of Chicago’s significant financial advisors, Jade lost her credibility when her fiancé (and coworker) stole millions of dollars from their clients in a Ponzi scheme. Now she’s agreed to help one of them–an aging 1960s Hollywood starlet named Berenice “Benny” Alderidge–seek financial restoration.
Jade sets off along Route 66 with Benny and her handsome adult foster son, Bridger, who is filming a documentary retracing the 1956 trip that started the love story between Benny and her recently deceased husband, Paul. Listening to Benny recount her story draws Jade into memories of her own darker association with Route 66, when she was kidnapped as a child by a man the media labeled a monster–but she remembers only as daddy.
Together, all three of these pilgrims will learn about family, forgiveness, and what it means to live free of the past. But not before Jade faces a second staggering betrayal that changes everything.
