This RITA® Reader Challenge 2017 review was written by Catherine Heloise. This story was nominated for the RITA® in the Mainstream Fiction with a Central Romance category.

Here is Catherine Heloise's review:

I picked this book mostly because it had a pretty title, which is the e-book variant on judging a book by its cover, I suppose! I don’t read in the Mainstream / Women’s Fiction genre much, and I like to use the RITAs to broaden my horizons. Usually, this makes books a little easier to review, because I am slightly less immersed in the experience, and can be more usefully critical. The Color of Promise is proving tricky in this respect, because for me it sat halfway between ‘good book, but I’m the wrong audience’ and ‘I think I want to read more of this author, but maybe not for a few years’. I’m pretty sure my mother-in-law would love it, except for the reincarnation bits.

And speaking of which, I think I should perhaps start by mentioning that while this is quite a sweet book and there is no graphic violence or anything like that (and also no on-page sex), when you make reincarnation a theme, characters are going to die. Including children. And later on, the hero and heroine are involved in investigating a plane crash in which everyone died. Including children. Nothing is described in graphic detail, but they do talk about finding bodies and parts thereof, and these are images you might not wish to have in your head. So proceed with caution.

The Color of a Promise starts slowly, and a little confusingly, at least to me. Jack, our hero and an investigative journalist, has just woken up in hospital after being severely injured in Afghanistan, in an attack that killed all the people he was with. This near-death experience shocks his brother into trying to extend an olive branch and relinquish their life-long rivalry, but Jack isn’t ready for that yet. We then go back to Jack’s childhood and see some of the events that set up the rivalry, as well as meeting the person who will later be reincarnated as Meg, the heroine of this story.

Meg and Jack meet when a plane falls out of the sky just down the road from Jack’s parents’ house while he is on holiday. Meg is fourteen years younger than Jack, and has overcome a lifelong fear of flying to become someone who investigates plane crashes and tries to work out what engineering or safety standards can be improved. This job is something of an obsession for her – she doesn’t actually like it, but she works extremely long hours, and rarely goes home. This works just fine for her relationship, because her partner is a surgeon who works equally long hours. They are both married to their jobs and are quite content to rarely see each other.

Jack, who, is reporting on the plane crash, is instantly drawn to Meg and the feeling is mutual. Their relationship grows steadily through the book, and doesn’t really hit any hiccups. Meg needs to work out what to do about Malcolm, the surgeon, but it’s pretty clear where this is going from the start, and she needs to figure out how to have a life outside her job. Jack’s main character development is about finally getting over his rivalry with his brother, and properly accepting that the woman he thought he loved is and will remain his sister-in-law and that actually, they are both happy with that relationship. But there are really no doubts from the start that Jack and Meg belong together, and they are both mature people who behave with integrity both in their work and their relationships.

The reincarnation plot is done fairly lightly at first. It’s very obvious from the start who Meg must be, and why she has made the choices she has. At the end of the story, it becomes significantly less subtle, and it’s clear that a large part of Meg’s character development is about resolving past life baggage. One thing that did irritate me a bit was that Jack recognises Meg fairly early on, but never actually tells her, even once there is ‘proof’ of who she is. I realise that he doesn’t want her to think he is a nutcase, but particularly in the final chapter or so, it feels as though he is withholding information from her.

The story moves along quite slowly and gently, exploring all the relationships between the various characters while Meg and her team slowly disentangle what happened with the aeroplane, with some help from Jack, who has been looking into the airline’s past history. I think this is where my unfamiliarity with the genre is perhaps a problem in reviewing this, because I wanted more romance, or more of a mystery plot, or something, and I’m not sure if that’s a problem with the book or my expectations. I felt as though I could predict nearly every turn in the plot, both in terms of the romance and in terms of the mystery (and definitely in terms of the past life stuff), which was comforting in some ways but frustrating in others. There was some really good writing in this book – it’s in a more literary style than the two short contemporaries I’ve reviewed so far, for example – but I wanted more, and I’m not sure what I wanted more of. The inner workings of Meg and Jack’s relationship, perhaps? The process of figuring out what happened to the aeroplane? Even more of the reincarnation plot?

I liked the book, and I liked Meg and Jack, but on some level, it didn’t quite satisfy me. Having said that, I bet that Julianne MacLean would be a great author to read if you were at home with a cold and your head was all stuffy – there’s something very comforting about her style, and the slow pace would work really well if you were feeling under the weather and wanted a story where you knew everyone would be basically kind and decent and things would work out OK in the end.

Maybe I’ll save her for then.