Aloha Rose by Lisa Carter

About the book: When Laney Carrigan's adoptive parents encourage her as an adult to seek out her birth family, her only clue is the Lokelani quilt in which she was found wrapped as an infant. Centering her search on the Big Island, she battles fears of rejection from a family that abandoned her once before while her faith struggles to embrace God's love.

Along the path to her true heritage, she meets Hawaiian cowboy/helicopter pilot, Kai Barnes. Kai is determined to protect the people he's come to regard as family against a woman he suspects of being nothing more than a gold-digger, but he finds himself drawn to Laney in spite of his reservations. He's spent his entire life seeking forgiveness from past mistakes and longs for a second chance at happiness. 

Laney's painstaking journey to find restoration and a place to belong among the breathtaking allure of the Big Island will lead her closer to her past and maybe even something more.

Purchase a copy: http://ow.ly/qKmVW

Landing page: 

 http://litfusegroup.com/campaigns/quilts-of-love-the-christmas-quilt-and-aloha-rose

 

 

Meet the author: Lisa Carter has been published in MomSense and Christian Parenting Today. Lisa is currently teaching music at a preschool and enjoying the enthusiasm and joy for life for which preschoolers are famous. She and David have two beautiful daughters.

Find out more at: http://www.quiltsoflovebooks.com


My thoughts:
I was excited to join this Litfuse blog tour for this new book.  I love quilts.  There is a local fair each summer in a nearby city and one of their attractions is the quilt barn.  Walking though and admiring all the different quilts is one of my family's favorite parts of the festival.  There is always one quilt up for a raffle drawing and we enter every year for the chance to win it. 

This book was about a woman who was adopted as an infant after being left by her mother on the doorstep of her adoptive parents.  The only thing her birth mother left her was a quilt with the words Aloha, Rose.  Feeling that she was abandoned and unwanted as a baby, even though she found loving parents, she has decided to find out what she can of her past so she can move past these childhood wounds.  She meets a grandmother who is suffering dementia and assorted adopted family which included Kai, a man who came to live with her aunt when he was child after his mother passed away.  Both Kai and Laney are walking around with a lot of baggage from their childhoods and their time with current wars.

Laney allows herself to get close to these people who claim to be her family, but always holds a part or herself back and keeps her escape route intact, as she has all her life.  How can she trust the people who let her mother leave the island and never followed or looked for her?  How can she know for sure she is in the right place solely based on a quilt her mother made?  If her grandfather didn't want her as an unborn infant can her grandmother really want her as an adult?

Laney has to allow herself to work through all her protective layers and trust that God is guiding her to a place she will feel at home.  She stumbles off this path more than once and questions her own decisions as well as those of the people around her, until she allows herself to stand still and listen to God and her heart and her family.  Sometimes we are so busy moving and running that we fail to just listen in order to know the truth.