“Heartbreak and Hope”: A Review of Where Yellow Flowers Bloom, by Kim Cantin
(Los Angeles: Precocity Press, 2023). ISBN: 979-8-9873501-6-4. Over the past two decades, I have reviewed eight books written by female authors sharing their process of grief and their inspiring journey to hope. In most of these stories, their loss is that of a teenage child. As a father of three adult children, I cannot begin to fathom the depth of pain that comes with losing a child. As fate would have it, I spent the day before I began this review with two mothers who lost their teenage children—one to drowning and one to murder. In the latter case, her daughter—a star in the classroom and on the soccer field—became addicted to opioids after back surgery when she was sixteen, beginning a descent into illegal drug use in a world of ruthless people who, several years later, lured, tortured, and killed her before leaving her body by the side of the road. Their journeys are profound and vastly different. The former was lost in a haze of prescription medications until she met the s...