The Bride Wore Starlight by Lizbeth Selvig

This was more than I had anticipated and it is not the easiest to put into words.

It would have been easy to look at this as being just people finding their way to their happy ever after but in doing that I would have missed the point of the story completely.

This was a voyage of discovery, this was a long hard look at the internal struggles that the main characters had to deal with before they would be able to even contemplate moving forward.

It is about solving and resolving the troubles that they have encountered and learning to give their hearts time to heal before they can even contemplate a relationship that could work on any level.

Alec and Joelly, didn’t exactly get off to the most auspicious start when they first met, they seemed to rub each other up the wrong way but I think that, that was more as a result of the fact that neither of them were in a particularly happy place.

Joelly was really struggling to get a handle on how she was feeling about her disability and she wasn’t doing a particularly good job about keeping her motivation high, she was wallowing so to speak and that is not a term that I like to use, she had a right to feel the way she did, her situation was far from easy but her self-pity was not her best feature but it was the wall that Alec met first.

Alec didn’t want her to see her disability as the limitation that she did, he wanted her to see that it didn’t define her.

Yes, it was an obstacle that she needed to overcome, but it was not one that she needed to allow to beat her down. But despite his words, Joelly was struggling.

Alec was a tough taskmaster in some respects and at times I thought his words were exceptionally harsh but he needed her to fight and to that end he pushed her all the way. He had enough on his plate battling his own demons but his situation with Joelly provided a distraction from all of that and gave him breathing space from his own angst.

The book was very well written, wonderfully descriptive and very poignant. It has a moral undertone that showed beautifully that sometimes you have to fight yourself to be able to learn to love life, in whatever guise your happiness takes on.

The book was littered with humour but moreover it also reduced me to tears on more than one occasion.

I will enjoy reading this again, of that I have no doubt.