Review: Take This Regret by A.L. Jackson

Take This Regret

by A.L. Jackson

Published: July 21, 2011

There are some mistakes we make that we will regret for the rest of our lives. For Christian Davison, it was the day he betrayed Elizabeth Ayers. For five years, Christian has regretted the day he walked away from his family and will do anything to win them back. Can Elizabeth forgive someone who has committed the unforgiveable? Or are there some wounds that go so deep they can never heal?

First chapters are usually my deciding point whether I’d go on through a book or not. There are those that capture you right from the very start, the part where you can’t tear your gaze away from the page, demanding for more. That’s what Take This Regret is like, for me. From the time I finished the first few pages, I can already tell that I’d love this book. And I did. 

Committed to her future as an attorney and having the perfect boyfriend beside her, Elizabeth Ayers almost had it all. But when the unexpected happened, she was forced to make hard decisions and choose a completely different path, one without the boy she love the most, her college life left behind, and the future she envisioned gone.

Five years later, she was reconnected with the past she thought she had lost and the path she wished never to travel again. When Christian Davison walked back into her life asking for forgiveness and to take him back, all the hurt and betrayal came rushing back filling her with confusion and cripple her with longing. But trust doesn’t come easy, she would never allow him to destroy her life once again and protect the ones she love from all the hurt he’d once given her.   

I was instantly touched the first time I read this book. It was definitely heart wrenching and there never was a time where I thought I’d abandon this book with all its drama. I love A.L. Jackson's writing and how it changes from Elizabeth’s to Christian’s perspective which opens us to both sides of the story; how deeply hurt Elizabeth is and how Christian regrets the decisions he'd made for leaving behind the person he can't live without. The book tells us of how both of them had lived their lives for the past five years of being apart and how they'd mended all the broken pieces of the love they still carry all this time.

Take This Regret is a journey of second chances, trust, and a love feared but never lost, now cherished once again.

Words! 

“Once again, I found myself on the edge looking down, wondering when I’d get so close that I’d fall. Or maybe I’d just jump.”

-Elizabeth

“They say cowards run in the face of danger or pain. I supposed that’s what I was, what I’d become, too fearful to love, too fearful to be loved, too afraid to live—so I ran.”

-Elizabeth

“Maybe now I really understood why Elizabeth had run from me all of these months, why she would never allow herself to believe. A love as intense as the one we shared, one that had not dimmed through years of betrayal but had only grown, was terrifying. We had the power to destroy, to devastate and ruin, to lay the other to waste. But I wasn’t running.”  

-Christian

“For so long, I’d wanted to hear those words fall from her lips. I’d just had no idea that in those words there would be so much sadness, that they would be tainted by years of her sorrow, and that my own thrill in finally hearing her say them aloud would be tarnished by the immense amount of resentment over what she had done.” 

-Christian