Staci Troilo’s new novel, Type and Cross, starts with a tragedy beyond comprehension. At first, the family impacted the most appears detached from the emotional aspects of losing one of their one. However, that facade is soon fractured into a million pieces as the family learns they’ve never been put together with much more than scotch tape.

Staci Troilo visited this blog a few weeks ago to talk about how she came up with the idea. She mentioned that the initial concept came from real life. However, I’m glad she specified the family in the novel does not resemble her own.

Vanessa and Royce Keller should have a charmed life, but the reader soon discovers that life certainly isn’t green in their garden. It’s a shade of brown, ugly and wilted, maybe even beyond repair. Ms. Troilo creates a type of dysfunctional family in this portrait, and the emotions and actions played out by the grief-stricken parents come across as real and riveting. Once I stepped into the lives of the Kellers and Cathedral Lake where they live, I didn’t want to leave, despite the horrors facing the family.

Using the death of their daughter, Hope, as the catalyst from which all change occurs, a family in mourning emerges to reveal the lack of both communication and understanding between them all.

Type and Cross allows the reader a voyeuristic look at life with the Kellers at the most crucial point in their lives, and from that intrusion, the reader learns that even the most damaged and destroyed of relationships can be salvaged with love.

By the end, when I’d completely fallen in love with this family, the grass turned green and light flowed into the home. Hope returned in the guise of the newly landscaped yard and the purchase of a nursery where Vanessa and Royce will work together to create a new type of family and life.

I didn’t want the story to end, but was heartened to read that Ms. Troilo plans to release a sequel that follows the son Jensen as he copes with the aftermath of his sister’s death.

If you love family dramas, believable characters, and realistic dialogue, then you’ll fall in love with Type and Cross, just as I did.

NOTE: I received a free copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Click here to read my review of Staci’s first book, Mystery, Ink – Mystery Heir.