The Power of an Enthralling Book Premise

It’s a transfixing premise that makes a book mesmerizing and unputdownable.

Between You and Us, by Kendra Broekhuis, boasts one of the most alluring premises I have ever heard: “When a grieving woman unexpectedly steps into a different version of her life, she must choose between the husband she loves and the daughter she lost in this brave, gripping novel.” Readers, I was propelled through this book, staying up too late on several nights to finish it and discover the how, the what, and the why behind the main character’s choices.

When I found that Broekhuis, who grew up near Grand Rapids, Mich., was a member of City Reformed Church, a CRC congregation in downtown Milwaukee, Wis., I had to get the tea straight from the author herself. I had many questions, including how she was inspired to write this extraordinary book.

“I never considered fiction when I began writing; it was not on my radar,” Broekhuis said. “I preferred reading fiction but writing nonfiction.”

But a personal tragedy set her and her husband, Collin, on a path of grief and awareness for which there were no easy answers. Nine years ago, Broekhuis delivered their beloved second daughter, Aliza, stillborn at 33 weeks.

“Grief had begun,” she said, at her 20-week ultrasound, when doctors determined that the baby had triploidy, a rare, life-threatening chromosomal disorder that occurs when a fetus has three copies of each chromosome instead of the normal two. Aliza was not developing properly and was not expected to live.

“People are living hard stories,” Broekhuis said. “What does it feel like to honestly grieve while living with a shred of hope? Grief brings up so many what-if questions, too. You are grieving the memories you were going to make but didn’t get the chance to.”

This experience of sorrow helped shape her character Leona’s story of loss and life after loss. While watching a Marvel movie set in a multiverse (the idea that beyond the evident universe, other universes might exist as well), Leona’s choices unfurled.

In the novel, Leona is presented with an otherworldly choice when she steps into an alternative universe where her late daughter, Vera, is alive and growing, but her relationship with her husband is cold and strained. Will she choose to live in the world where her daughter’s heart beats, or the one in which her marriage is warm and enduring? Is she even able to choose?

Broekhuis drew from her own life experience of growing up in a “privileged” neighborhood but then choosing as an adult to live in an urban environment where “the majority live at or below the poverty line” to add “socioeconomic threads” to “complicate (Leona’s) choice.”

The result is an enthralling novel that offers “perceptive renderings of the nuances of grief, the challenges of healing, and what it means to trust God’s will,” a review in Publishers Weekly said.

Broekhuis, who lives with her husband and their four children—Jocelyn, Levi, Cecily, and Marre—calls her book “clean fiction” as opposed to overtly “Christian fiction.”

“I wrote this thinking it would be shopped to a general market,” she said. “I wanted the book to have redemptive themes and to end feeling hopeful. I didn’t want to spiritually bypass anyone’s loss, but as Christians we have hope.”

The author is working on her second book for Waterbrook, the Christian division of Penguin Random House. The hook? “The (main character) finds out on the day of her dad’s funeral that he is not her biological dad.”

Well, that sounds like another unputdownable read to me.