Amy Harmon - The Law of Moses

Author: Amy Harmon

Title: The Law of Moses (The Law of Moses #1)

Language: English

Format: ebook

Rating: 3 stars

Reading challenge:  A book where the protagonist has superpower(s)

No of pages: 364

Date read: 05.12-09.12.2017

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BLURB:

If I tell you right up front, right in the beginning that I lost him, it will be easier for you to bear. You will know it’s coming, and it will hurt. But you’ll be able to prepare.

Someone found him in a laundry basket at the Quick Wash, wrapped in a towel, a few hours old and close to death. They called him Baby Moses when they shared his story on the ten o’clock news – the little baby left in a basket at a dingy Laundromat, born to a crack addict and expected to have all sorts of problems. I imagined the crack baby, Moses, having a giant crack that ran down his body, like he’d been broken at birth. I knew that wasn’t what the term meant, but the image stuck in my mind. Maybe the fact that he was broken drew me to him from the start.

It all happened before I was born, and by the time I met Moses and my mom told me all about him, the story was old news and nobody wanted anything to do with him. People love babies, even sick babies. Even crack babies. But babies grow up to be kids, and kids grow up to be teenagers. Nobody wants a messed up teenager.

And Moses was messed up. Moses was a law unto himself. But he was also strange and exotic and beautiful. To be with him would change my life in ways I could never have imagined. Maybe I should have stayed away. Maybe I should have listened. My mother warned me. Even Moses warned me. But I didn’t stay away.

And so begins a story of pain and promise, of heartache and healing, of life and death. A story of before and after, of new beginnings and never-endings. But most of all...a love story.

There's something about Amy Harmon's books that simply draws readers in and makes her books almost irresistible. While I have liked the books I have read by Amy Harmon, I've never really gotten it like other readers seem to. The Law of Moses is just like that too. 

I had some trouble with this book at first, because I didn't really grasp the fact that Moses had an ability to see the dead and that he drew and painted so compulsively due to that. The more I read, the more I grasped, but it was really difficult for me to understand at first.

I liked that Harmon wrote about an interracial couple and I quite liked them together, but I have to tell you - I'm not very big on second chance romances even when authors explain the things so well like Harmon did in this case. I liked that there was some reason behind the years long separation, but honestly, I would've loved some old-fashioned talking and communicating in the first place instead. 

On the one hand, I felt that I kind of got why Georgia was drawn to Moses and vice versa, but on the other hand, I don't rightly get it either. We get some glimpses into their heads, but do we see where the attraction is coming from? Not really. There's some physical connection, there seems to be some emotional connection as well, but there's also something missing.

Also, the mystery of the girls disappearing and turning up dead simply brought down my enjoyment of the love story because I felt that the main attention wasn't the couple. But the mystery part wasn't also developed quite right - it sat on the back burner for the longest time, occasionally surfacing, but mostly waiting for the final reveal that kind of came out of nowhere.

All in all, I liked it, but I don't really think I'm going to re-read this one.