Review: Rescue by Anita Shreve (audio book)

From the back of the audio case: A rookie paramedic pulls a young woman from her totaled car, a first rescue  that begins a lifelong tangle of love and wreckage. Sheila Arsenault is a gorgeous enigma – streetwise and tough-talking, with haunted eyes, fierce desires, and a never-look-back determination. Peter Webster, as straight an arrow as they come, falls for her instantly and entirely. Soon Sheila and Peter are embroiled in an intense love affair, married, and parents to a baby daughter. Like the crash that brought them together, it all happened so fast.

Can you ever really save another person? Eighteen years later, Sheila is long gone and Peter is raising their daughter, Rowan, alone. But Rowan is veering dangerously off track, and for the first time in their ordered existence together, Peter fears for her future. His work shows him every danger the world contains and how wrong everything can go in a second. All the love a father can give a daughter is suddenly not enough.

Now Sheila’s return may be a godsend – or it may be exactly the wrong moment for a lifetime of questions and anger and longing to surface anew. What tore a young family apart? Is there even worse damage ahead? The questions lifted up in Anita Shreve’s utterly enthralling new novel are deep and lasting, and this is a book that could only have been written by a master of the human heart.

Read by: Dennis Holland

My thoughts: This was an intense audio book – narrated by Dennis Holland who did a fabulous job with the different voices, giving each character their own personality. It’s a story that forces you to think about what you are willing to risk for the sake of your child.  

Rescue is a novel in two parts. It’s about paramedic Peter Webster and his relationships with the two most important women in his life: his wife Sheila and his daughter Rowan. Webster loves his job as a paramedic and we see him in action in quite a few daring rescues. It is at one of these rescues, a drunk-driving crash, where he meets Sheila, who he begins to date and then eventually marry. Not being able to be both a mother and a drunk, Sheila chooses to take off, leaving Webster alone to raise Rowan. Now a teenager, Peter begins to struggle when Rowan becomes very angry towards him and starts to follow the same destructive path he saw in Sheila. Unsure of  the best way to handle this, he turns to the one person who just might be able to help. But will bringing Sheila into their lives be a good thing or cause more damage?  Anita Shreve writes a compelling moral story with a reminder to us that sometimes those who are our best equipped, and most professional “rescuers,” are not always the ones capable of saving their own families in crisis.

(I borrowed this audio book from the library.)