Interior designer Emma Reynolds is doing great after a bad year … until her twenty-week scan reveals her baby boy has semi-lobar holoprosencephaly, a brain abormality that causes seizures, developmental delays, diabetes, and other health problems. Despite the obvious challenges ahead, she is determined to keep her baby.
EMT supervisor Ben Sullivan sees the distraught woman as he’s delivering a patient to the hospital. He can’t do anything but pray … but God brings them back together when he is the EMT who answers the emergency call for Theo’s birth.
Mason Hughes is a high school student with no idea what to do with his life. He’s less than pleased when his mother signs him up to shop for Emma once a week. He’d rather be playing Minecraft or Fortnite and building his blog. In that, he echoed the preferences of many teenage boys.
As the title implies, Ben is the real hero of this story.
He’s a Christian, an EMT (always a great start), and a genuinely good guy. His main fault is that he likes to be in charge, which makes it difficult for him to give his backup EMTs the freedom to actually do their jobs. However, his desire to take charge never crosses the line into being controlling,and I appreciated that.
Mason also turns out to be a hero in his own way, mostly because of Ben’s encouragement and good example.
I will admit to some apprehension from the opening line—so many novels have All the Bad Things happen to their characters that I was afraid Emma was going to lose her job and have to figure out not only how to raise a child with special healthcare needs on her own, but have to do it with no job and no medical insurance. Fortunately that turned out not to be the case.
I found Emma’s character a little confusing at first. Where is her baby’s father? He’s not mentioned, which got me wondering why not. The question was eventually addressed, but that did mean, it took a little longer for me to warm to Emma as a character. She came into her own once Theo was born and we could see her inspirational tenacity and determination to keep Theo alive.
What I especially liked was the character growth from each of the three main characters, especially Emma and Mason. In some ways, they are different sides of the same coin: Emma is the single parent raising her son alone who still needs to forgive herself and accept God’s forgiveness, and Mason is the son of a single mother who needs to forgive the father who abandoned him.
Emma’s Hero was inspired by a real-life baby.
It’s great to see Christian fiction—especially Christian romance—that deals with some of the hard situations and show we can rely on God to bring us through.
Recommended for readers who want a solid Christian romance and aren’t going to be triggered by a baby with a life-threatening condition.
Thanks to Mountain Brook Ink for providing a free ebook for review.
About Carrie Walker
Carrie Walker lives in Michigan with her husband and seven children. From her ten years serving as a high school youth minister, adventures around the globe, and raising a family, many stories have been knit within her heart.
As an avid reader she pens what she loves to read, contemporary stories that bring hope to a hurting world. Weaving romance among story lines of characters in struggle, she aims to show God working in all situations. When she’s not playing board games with her husband, shuttling kids in the Walker bus or wishing for snow, Carrie can be found at the keyboard bringing those stories to life.
Carrie’s writing has been recognized in many contests. Her debut novel, Emma’s Hero, placed in the ACFW Crown Award, Monroe Walton Center for the Arts Award, and won the 2020 ACFW First Impressions Contest.
Find Carrie Walker online at:
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About Emma’s Hero
“God won’t give me more than I can handle? I’m pretty sure He just did.”
After a year of loss and bad choices distance Emma Reynolds from her lifelong beliefs, she finds herself pregnant and alone at a twenty-week ultrasound, hearing the words “incompatible with life.” When her son, Theo, survives birth, she fights to give him the best care possible. As each day passes, Emma’s love for Theo grows—along with her fear of losing him. She can’t understand why God allows her son to suffer.
Seventeen-year-old blogger, Mason Hughes, feels lonely and worthless after his father left their family years ago. When he ignores his mother’s push to “contribute to society,” she volunteers him to help Emma each week. Wishing he’d applied for any other job, Mason has no choice but to grocery shop and practice his rusty social skills with a mother and son he doesn’t know.
Paramedic Ben Sullivan has earned himself the title of “most eligible” bachelor among his friends as they continually set him up on blind dates. While he’d love to avoid the uncomfortable events, his heart can’t help but seek the one thing missing in his life—a marriage like his parents have. If only he could find the woman himself.
As Theo’s tiny life connects them to each other, their loneliness breaks under the love of community, and they will never be the same.
