WHEN STARS ALIGN

An accident brings a former couple back together in McCoy’s debut novel.

Augustus “Auggie” Owens, an emergency room doctor in Cincinnati, immediately starts working on a Jane Doe who was hit by a car. While attempting to get her stabilized, he notices a very familiar scar on her neck and suddenly realizes that he knows his patient. It’s Elsie McCormick, a woman he met and fell in love with seven years ago. As Auggie stabilizes her and sends her off to the operating room, he thinks back on how the two of them met and how everything seemed so perfect before things fell apart. Elsie was in college at the University of Cincinnati, studying music performance, and he was in his third year of residency at the university hospital. Everything about their relationship seemed right, and they made concrete plans together: Elsie wanted to go to Nashville to start her music career, and Auggie was planning to apply to a hospital there. However, a fateful conversation with someone close to Elsie sends him reeling, and instead of talking things through with his girlfriend, he does what he thinks is best by bowing out of her life. But now that fate has brought them back together, Auggie can’t ignore how he feels any longer. Can Elsie forgive him? In this modern second-chance-at-love story, McCoy pens a sweet tale of romance that initially seems doomed, although the author takes care to give readers a pinprick of light at the end of the tunnel. The interactions between Auggie and Elsie when they’re younger are almost saccharine-sweet at times, with lines such as “You, my dear, have a handsome, strong boyfriend to protect you.” However, it effectively showcases how naïve young people can be regarding the world at large. As the sunshine of the past is juxtaposed with the darkness of the future, readers will yearn for a happy ending for the two main players.

An often heartbreaking page-turner.