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Life throws all of us unexpected curves, and I would bet that everyone reading this vividly remembers many of these moments from their past.  These moments are what help define who we are or who we will eventually be. 

Welcome Home is about change.  It’s the story of Shelby and her five childhood friends who learn the hard way how to survive difficult and sometimes tragic events that will inevitably change all of their lives. The events these six friends endure come from many sides: family, fear, silence, but more difficult to comprehend is the betrayal from within their own circle.

After reading Welcome Home I tried to recall a time when another book had touched me so close to home, one that literally made tears pool in my eyes; not only for the characters, but for the memories of my own childhood and the love and loss that I have faced during my life, and frankly I couldn’t think of one single book that even came close to this one.

The novel starts out with Shelby returning to her hometown 30 years after she graduated from High School, a town she swore she would never return to permanently.  Yet after years of traveling as a photo journalist life throws her another curve, the death of her estranged mother and a possible new job at a local magazine publishing house.  She arrives in her hometown just before her 30^th high school reunion.  At the reunion Shelby is confronted by one of her childhood friends; the same friend that destroyed their last year of high school and tore their friendship apart.  It is this meeting that throws Shelby back in time to finally confront the pain and betrayal that she and the others have lived with for all of their adult life.

Glenda has woven an amazing story of love, hate, coming out, and death.  It’s a story that everyone can relate to and if someone reading this novel, doesn’t feel for the characters or feel a twinge of sadness, hope or joy seeping up from their own past, then the person hasn’t experienced their own life.

This is more than a story of betrayal and loss it’s a story of hope.  Hope that no matter what life throws our way, we have the strength and ability to survive, to forgive and to love once more.

Read this novel just have a few tissues handy.

Reviewed by William Holden