BOOK REVIEW: Sacred Hart by A.M. Johnson

Title: Sacred Hart

Author: A.M. Johnson

Release Date: June 13, 2016

B L U R B 

Sleep, it was luxury I didn’t have.

I could hear it then, in the dark light of night, in the dusky morning…

The click of the trigger, the smell of her blood, the sound of the rain. 

I never thought I would see her again. 

She was a ghost. 

She was dead.

When Maggie Wright pushed her way into my life, she brought the phantom with her, and I was helpless to her pull. 

Everything I had, all of it, had been taken from me ten years ago. I had nothing but the shirt on my back, the memories that still burned through my veins, and the regret I drowned in every day.

I am Ryan Hartford...and I have nothing left to lose.

M Y   R E V I E W 

5/5 stars

I am addicted to the way Miss Amanda writes a book. Everything is palpable and every form of depth is felt. Sacred Hart started with a drowning feeling, and slowly, easily, marvelously, Miss Amanda roused me up from the flood of emotions this book has caused.

God, I wished I could pour half of my soul into his chest, give him that happiness he deserved, the love he’d once had, but I couldn’t.

Ryan Hart lost all his life’s value after he lost his daughter while his wife cheated on him. After paying for the cost of his vengeance, he found himself torn between finding a new purpose or succumbing to the loss completely. The complexity of Ryan’s character was almost overwhelming. The way he was so broken and yet so seemingly fine at the same time was something that caught my heart. He was a man who carried loss but kept a calm, loving, pure soul right beneath him. And man, unraveling Ryan was all kinds of swoon. 

Maggie was like the needle of a compass. No matter how hard I tried to get lost inside myself, she pulled me north, up, toward the light… toward her.

Maggie Wright was blessed to have been able to keep the person she valued in her life—her daughter. She knew what it was like to trust and to lose, to love and be ripped open by loss. Now she didn’t know if she could afford another. Maggie and her little B was definitely a source of light in this book. As a Mom, she was a force to be reckoned with; careful, loving, selfless. A woman, she was fire that needed just a spark of Ryan Hart to enflame. 

My heart… it was fierce enough for the both of us.

The thing I really loved about the book was that the weight wasn’t on the plot. Plot wise, it was actually light and very easy to get into. It was the characters’ depths that drove the story into a gripping intensity. Every character was real and palpable, and the way they connected with each other was so poignant and light at the same time. Page after page, this book just completely sucked me whole. I love the little heartbreaks and the heart-quenching meltdowns, the sobs and the shrieks, the indifference and the sensuality. Obviously, this book has driven me in contradicting ways that I absolutely loved! With the author’s addictive prose and the unique streaks in this book, Sacred Hart was a consuming read. It somehow showed that sometimes, when you drown in loss, you don’t fight until you get out of the waters. You just learn how to swim.