‘Skipping a Beat’ will bring readers to tears

At times, it takes a drastic change — like dying — to enable a person to see more clearly the things that are important in life.

Julia Dunhill's planning one of her many fundraisers when life as she knows it turns upside down. Julia’s husband, Michael, a highly successful and highly stressed health-drink executive, collapses while at work. Michael stood up to make a presentation and his heart just stopped. In fact, Michael was officially dead for four minutes and eight seconds.

When Michael is revived, he emerges a changed man, eager to right his wrongs and reconnect with the one woman he has always loved. The question is will Julia be able to forgive, heal and trust the new man her husband has suddenly become when he has been a stranger for so long?

Julia is sent into a panic when Michael proposes to give away everything they own — the business, the mansion, the expensive cars — everything, and she begins to ponder a way to save herself from what she at first considers a mental breakdown in her husband. But after agreeing to give Michael three weeks to explain his actions and his new focus on life, Julia soon sees that underneath the glitz and glamour of their wildly extravagant lifestyle, she and Michael are still the same people they were when they first fell in love, and she joins his fight to return to the way they were when they were happiest.

In her second novel, “Skipping a Beat,” author Sarah Pekkanen gives her readers an inside look at the materialistic world of the rich and asks the question: Would you give up everything you have and own to have love in your life?

With an intense cast of characters and a dramatic roller coaster ride of a story, Pekkanen delivers a heart-wrenching and heartfelt tale that will leave an impact on the reader long after the last page is read. There aren’t many books that bring me to tears, but the final fourth of this book with its surprising and emotion-packed ending had me sobbing like a child. If an author can inspire that kind of emotion through her gift of words, then she has done her job with talented finesse — and with “Skipping a Beat,” Sarah Pekkanen has done her job superbly.