Laurie chimes in about ROLLER COASTERS: THE LIFE KIND book....

I came across Roller Coasters: The Life Kind and wanted to reach out…

Many readers and gift buyers are building their holiday lists right now, and the holidays are when grief surfaces most for people who have lost someone, so this is a particularly meaningful moment to be discovered.

What stood out to me about Roller Coasters: The Life Kind is how honestly it frames the subject at the very start. Loss is the inevitable conclusion of life. Short or long, we are never promised tomorrow.

Do we, will we have, made the most and best of our time here? That is a direct question rather than a comforting statement, and it tells the reader this book will not shield them from the subject.

What I especially appreciated is the distinction you draw about grief. The warning about lingering too long in any of grief’s stages, shock, denial, anger, before reaching acceptance, paired with the insistence that acceptance is not forgetting, and that no one is truly lost unless we allow them to be forgotten. That reframe matters enormously, because a lot of grief writing asks people to move on in a way that feels like erasure, and you are explicitly rejecting that.

Calling it a quiet, stubborn act of love is exactly the right description, and it gives the reader something to do with their grief rather than something to get over.

What makes the book distinctive is its form. The afterword note that if the prose feels disjointed or the flow odd or uneven, that is a feature rather than a bug, and that life is that way, is a genuinely brave thing to put in a book, and it tells the reader the structure is doing work rather than being unfinished. It also gives permission to readers whose own experience of grief has not been linear.

What I found especially moving is the line from The Other Side of the Mountain, that a life with no sorrow in it was not, in many respects, a life worth living. That reframes sorrow as evidence of love rather than a failure to cope, and it is the kind of statement readers underline and return to.

 

The BookTrib review’s description of grief as a ride that refuses to stop, the same drops and turns, the same sickening return to the place where everything irrevocably changed, is an accurate and vivid reading of what you have built, and the observation that this is not a conventional plot-driven story but a meditation on what grief does after loss confirms the book is doing something more ambitious than a standard narrative.

 

The specific detail about Rick keeping Nevaeh’s phone just so he can hear her voicemail greeting is the kind of concrete gesture that tells a reader the author understands mourning from the inside, and it will be the moment many readers recognize themselves.

 

The DeLorean detail in the setup is also a nice touch, given the [BTTF movie] time-travel associations, which adds a layer of irony to a story about a night that cannot be undone.

 

Being the fifth book in the Life and Living series gives readers a body of work to explore, and books like this are frequently passed between friends who have lost someone, recommended by grief support communities, and read slowly over months rather than in one sitting.

 

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Thank you Laurie for your email about that all… Appreciate your kind words… NOTE TO ALL, RC:TLK is currently only available as an eBook (though from Amazon, ONE DOES NOT require a physical Kindle device, can be D/L to any digital device and read via any free eReader App/Program) or Amazon Audible aBook. And, yes, can be given as an eGift (they will get an email about your Gift purchase and they can then access)!

 

 

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