J. Sterling has broken our hearts with her beautiful romantic novels, showing us the true meaning of love, lust, and never giving up when the road gets hard. When all you want to do is leave for something easier when everything becomes too much, Sterling swoops in to remind us that anything that’s worth having doesn’t come easy, and that love, in spite of everything, is always worth fighting for. Through her books, her characters and their stories, Sterling makes us believe in the impossible, and once again she’s making us fall in her next book, The Other Game.
The Other Game is the newest edition to her previous trilogy, The Perfect Game novels, where we followed the lives of heart-throb, baseball playing Jack Carter and aspiring photographer, Cassie Andrews, who fall in love along the way, despite their differences, in turning their biggest dreams into realities. Now, Sterling takes us back to the start of the love story that inspired us, only this time through the eyes of Jack’s younger brother, Dean Carter.
Dean and Jack redefine family with such a close bond after being abandoned by both their parents at a young age. In The Perfect Game, we watch Jack win and then lose the girl of his dreams whilst trying to make it as a professional baseball player, with Dean in the wings every step of the way and now we get to see the same beautiful story through Deans perspective with brand new scenes we never saw in the first book.
Dean’s lived the same events, with his own story. His own journeys, loves and losses, and now we get to fall in love with both Carter brothers.
The book is due to be released as an ebook on October 25th, and you can preorder your copy now on Amazon, iBook, Nook and Kobo.
Sterling shared a glimpse into the first chapter of The Other Side with fans on both her blog and her GoodReads profile which you can now see here. From the looks of her post, she is just excited about us reading it as we are. The author posted with the teaser:
Have I mentioned that I can’t freaking wait for you all to read this book?! – J. Sterling
In her original trilogy, Sterling taught us many life lessons about love, and it being the major point that she wants to get across: that love in all it’s form is worth fighting for, and it’s one of the few things that we can get a full completeness from; that it is the best thing we can give or receive or teach others how to do; that it is the only thing that lasts forever.
However, I think there is a deeper meaning to Jack and Cassie’s story, and this is when I feel a deeper meaning, an underlining meaning, coming to surface. The message that it’s OK to forgive.
Both of the main characters mess up royally. They make mistakes; they’re flawed. But we all are – that’s the point of being human. We make mistakes so we know what the good looks like, so that we know how to do it right the next time. Personally, I believe that if you don’t make mistakes then you’ve never tried anything new. And as for relationships, if you don’t make mistakes then you’ll never know if your relationship can last through the peaks and the troughs. To know that you’re relationship is strong enough to survive, you need to make mistakes to learn to forgive and move on.
At first, both Cassie and Jack carry the guilt from their mistakes like anchors weighing them down. Punishing themselves for their wrongdoings. It takes the characters a while before they realise that it’s OK, if not expected, to forgive each other for their mistakes, but what they fail to see for a large proportion of the novels, is that it’s also OK for them to forgive themselves.
Until you do so, you can never be your true, most authentic version of yourself. The blame and guilt you carry around yourself for your mistakes makes you angry, irritated, not only at yourself but to those around you, and therefore you can never be your best self. Letting go of your mistakes, forgiving yourself, is sometimes the only way to go on.
I learned from these novels that when you think it’s someone else’s forgiveness you desire, and when they finally do, you don’t feel much better. It’s you who has to forgive yourself. Don’t hold on to weights that you don’t need to; don’t hold yourself back.
Maybe this same lesson will be throughout The Other Game; maybe it won’t. Either way, I can’t wait to find out.
Page By Paige 