I usually do not review books twice, let alone change my rating, but I am making an exception here with The Ruining Heaven. To explain, I have to backtrack to September 2015, when I first reviewed Hawser, by J Hardy Carroll. I stand by my review at that that time, so I won’t repeat it here, but I am upgrading my rating to four out of four stars.

I came across my review of Hawser by accident, following some comments in my blog, and I found myself in a memory block. While I had read the book, and reviewed it, and corresponded with the author directly about it, I oddly had no memory of  the details of the book. Granted, it’s been ten years, but you’d think I’d remember.

Nothing.

So I went to Amazon and tried to find it – but it did not appear to exist. Now I was really puzzled. How is it possible that I read a book, reviewed it, rated it highly, wrote a blog entry, and remembered nothing? And then the book does not seem to exist?

I then searched my emails for the author’s name and wrote to him. He responded within minutes, advised that he had edited the book and republished it under a new name, The Ruining Heaven. Oddly, the book is only available in paperback on Amazon, and since I am not reading hardcopy books anymore, I didn’t want to buy it in that format. Because by now I had decided that I’d have to reread this to figure out how I could possibly forget all about it. The author was kind enough to send me the Kindle version directly, along with two sequels (which I have not read yet).

Why did I forget all about it? It’s a very poignant story, particularly as some of the action takes place in wartime Germany, namely Silesia, where my own father was a child refugee during that exact time. The emotional damage inflicted on him from those experiences are still haunting him today, at age 89, and he keeps retelling the horrors he lived through. Ironically, I finished reading The Ruining Heaven while in a hotel room in Germany just a few days ago, right after having just talked to my father about just those times.

Why did I forget all about it? Two thoughts:

First, when you read as many books as I do, of as many different genres, it’s apparently possible to move on to the next one and erase the previous one. Sometimes, once I write the review, it frees me up to move on. There are only  that many grey cells available as I get older, and I need to clear the slate.

Second, the subject matter in the book is highly disturbing. War stories are never pleasant, and this one is crushing on many levels. Just like we tend to forget the hard periods in our lives, the embarrassing moments, the challenging episodes, as a natural block for our sanity, I may have blocked out most of this book just to protect myself and move on to better things.

Either way, The Ruining Heaven is a powerful war story. I thank the author for sending me the book and I highly recommend it, paperback and all.