Leigh Scott is a single mom who just wants the best for her only son, Jeff: a college degree and a good job. But when he starts seeing Jessica, a young woman with a troubled past and a questionable future, Leigh envisions all her best-laid plans going up in smoke. As Jeff spends more and more time with Jessica, Leigh sees her fears realized in Jeff’s dropping grades and bad choices. To top it off, Leigh finds her relationships with her parents, her brother, and a long-lost old flame getting more complicated. Will Leigh get through to her son in time? Or is there more to Jessica than meets the eye? This many-layered, emotional family saga will captivate readers as it shows them the peril of judgment, the need for forgiveness, and the gift of love.
“Wow. Really, that’s the first word that springs to mind when you ask me to sum up Nikki Arana’s new release, As I Have Loved You. She grabbed me in the prologue, when she parts the misty veil between heaven and earth and reveals the plan of God for one boy’s life. And she kept me hooked until the last page. This book made me cry—which is a real feat—and kept me thinking for days on end. . . . Each character grows and shifts and changes, alternately taking steps forward on the path to God and then slipping away down the path to self. But it’s the journey they each choose to make that really illuminates the depths of humanity within them; and it’s the place they finally reach that made me blink back tears and wonder what wonders await me behind the misty veil.” – Roseanna White, Christian Review of Books
“This is the story of a boy, and of God’s love. But it goes further than that: It is about God working in lives, in real lives.“It’s about Jeff, a boy with ADD, in itself a controversial disability. It’s about how it leaves a mark on one’s life, and gives insights into others’ hurting. It is about his mother, his grandparents, and his girlfriend. But more than that, it is about struggling in life while working on a closer relationship to God, and working on obedience in one’s life. It is not a story where everything works out, according to how we consider things working out. It is a story about perseverance, about working out our salvation with fear and trembling, about accepting that God’s will in our lives is not always the easy road nor the one we want to travel, but in the long run it is best. It is about doing the hard thing if that is where God puts you, and being faithful.“This story is a hard one to read, it is full of pain and heartache, but it is also about real people. The characters are well conceived, well drawn, and . . . just real. People you may have passed daily, people who are living next door or down the street. People who you know or see, but don’t know about the heartache in their lives.”– Betti Cogswell, Christian Fiction Review