The Last Way Home, by Liz Johnson, 2022, Revell (Baker Publishing Group)

A Hockey Player Returns Home

The Last Way Home tells the story of Eli Ross, an NHL hockey player who returns home to Prince Edward Island after more than a decade away.

It’s complicated. Why had he never returned, even for a visit, before now? I don’t want to spoil it for readers by giving away reasons.

Will his brothers and mother accept him? He doesn’t expect them to, but he has nowhere else to go.

And then there’s Violet Donaghy, a young lady who, he finds, his family has taken under wing as a family member. She’s cold to him, and extremely secretive. Which he can’t blame her for. After all, he’s not telling anyone his own secrets either.

No sooner does he arrive home, than a disaster occurs, and he decides to prove his integrity by pitching in to help. Helping Violet is like trying to help a snarling cat. But he ignores the snarling and persists. You’ll have to read it to see how that goes.

Plot and Writing Style

The plot seems to fit into a Prodigal Son trope. Both Eli and Violet carry a lot of angst resulting from years of hidden guilty feelings.

Despite his unrelenting efforts, Eli seems to be stuck on a train headed for doom. Will he be able to ditch it in the end?

The story is compelling, but it took me reading on a ways before I began to really like it. Revell asked me for an honest review, so here you have it. To be honest, I’m wondering whether authors these days are trying so hard to ‘show’ rather than ‘tell’, or to stay in a ‘deep point of view’, that the reader is left feeling a bit boggled at times. For example, instead of simply saying that a character felt anxious, we read that her stomach hit the floor. The first time this happened in the book, it took me a while to figure out whether it was literal or a figure of speech. And that was just the start. Both main characters really had problems with their stomachs dropping, hitting the ground, sinking or twisting.

The Last Way Home causes one to rethink secrets along with Eli and Violet. Is divulging them the best thing to do? Or could it cause more harm than good?

Learn more about the author and her books at LizJohnsonBooks.com.

Read other reviews of The Last Way Home on Goodreads by clicking here.