Book Review: Even After This by Deborah Clack
DNF Review
Content note: Please be aware this is a heavy read. It deals with grief and loss in detail. Meredith’s husband and two small children died in a car accident 4 years ago in a tragic way where she saw it while she was driving behind them. It's important I share this upfront. This is not a spoiler. But please be aware of the subject matter. Romance is clean with kisses only, 1 small curse word "p*ssed." I wish I knew about the death of children before I picked it up.
Update 7:50 pm 2/8/26: Adding content warning someone just told me about intentional destruction of embryos in IVF. Had no idea about this either!
I want to start gently here, because I know this story will absolutely work for some readers, but it did not work for me.
The grief is not just in the background, it is the entire emotional center of the book.
I went into this expecting a light, clean, slightly fluffy celebrity-meets-ordinary-girl romance, second chance at love after losing her husband type of thing.... I knew she was a widow from the description so I knew she probably had grief but her 1 and 3 year old children killed also, I just didn't expect this being so heavy throughout. I got to 50% and had to put it down. It was really affecting me. This book was marketed as a love story and the PR box felt more like it was for a fluffy rom-com, than a tragic grief story.
Because I wasn’t prepared for that level of emotional weight, it honestly blindsided me, and I chose to DNF for my own heart. Especially as a mother myself.
The book spends a lot of time asking how do you keep living after unimaginable loss, which is a powerful question. But for me, the answers felt vague and grounded mostly in moving forward, new experiences, and new love.
As a Christian reader, that left a noticeable gap. When a story goes this deep into grief and survival, I personally kept feeling the absence of faith in the Lord. I understand this isn’t a Christian novel, and I’m not saying every book must be, but when the story wrestles with suffering at this level, I struggled with the idea of healing without any sort of spiritual anchor, aka Jesus.
Honestly, the celebrity romance itself started to feel out of place to me too. While I loved seeing Harlan want to sit in her grief with her, I just feel like it was not what her heart truly needed in that season. From my perspective, she didn’t need a famous hero to help her move forward, she needed Jesus at the center of her healing. Even if this wasn't meant to be "Christian Fiction", I think it needed some brief mention of God. Even secular shows and books sometimes reference God briefly.
For me, it felt less like hope and more like a “keep busy and keep going” response, and I couldn’t emotionally connect to that. We also saw her going to their graves on her little girls birthday and grieving even more fervently. My heart kept asking: how do you survive something like this without the Lord being part of the healing?
I also think readers should be aware this is not a fluffy palate-cleanser romance. It reads much closer to women’s fiction about trauma and rebuilding life. If you are walking through grief or are sensitive to stories involving child loss, please know what you are getting into first.
This wasn’t a bad book, it just wasn’t the book I was expecting, and I wasn’t the right reader for it. I think this could have also been a contemporary healing story without any romance and it would have been different too. The romance was too instalove for me and just didn't make sense.
Quotes I did like:
"Your emotions don't scare me, Meredith. Neither does your story. I hate it for you, and I wished today at the zoo that I could take away some of your pain. But since I couldn't, I just decided to sit in it with you." - Harlan
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