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Forgiveness is Key
Second Chance Highway follows a young woman fleeing an abusive relationship with her infant daughter, who drives west in search of the mother who abandoned her and discovers that escape is just the beginning of healing. Why was a road trip the right structure for this kind of emotional and spiritual journey?
Ginny was stuck, but because of her supernatural encounter with TC, she realized she needed to be in another place, both physically and mentally. How better to get to your destination? You take a road—preferably one that leads you to the correct destination. I took a road trip to gather information for this novel. We planned nothing. We simply climbed into the truck and took off, much like Ginny did. Frankly, I’ve never had a more rewarding experience.
Faith is central to the novel. What role do “unexpected helpers” play in Ginny’s transformation?
They play the role of being the hands and feet of Jesus, so to speak. They help her overcome doubts, fears, and the trauma that led her to the destructive relationship with her abusive fiancé. God put them in her path just to keep her on the path He sought for her.
The relationship between Ginny and her mother carries a lot of weight. What drew you to that dynamic?
Thankfully, my mother never abandoned me. She is an excellent mother. However, in my years as a writer, I’ve met people who struggle with past, very deep wounds caused by people who were supposed to protect them. In some cases, these traumas have led to self-destructive behaviors that have kept them, at least for a while, from pursuing the call on their lives. Forgiveness is key to wholeness and healing. It’s a message I discuss a lot—probably to remind myself of my own unforgiving heart.
I hope the series continues in other books. If so, where will the story take readers?
I’m writing another book now, but it tells the story of another fictional character, Lulu, who is grappling with the effects of a disintegrating family.
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Ginny Carmichael feels trapped in her abusive relationship until an otherworldly visit ignites her determination to break free. With her baby daughter in tow, she embarks on a courageous road trip that not only takes her away from danger but also leads her to unexpected kindness, genuine connections, and profound forgiveness.
Along the way, she meets a compassionate waitress, a spirited aunt, and ultimately her estranged mother, who may hold the key to her healing. As Ginny approaches her destination-and the truth about her worth-she discovers that escape was never the destination. Wholeness was.
Second Chance Highway is a poignant tale of faith, friendship, and the path to restoration and redemption, and is the sequel to the award-winning Always Think of Me.
Second Chance Highway
Second Chance Highway opens in motion and panic: Ginny Carmichael has fled an abusive fiancé in Atlanta, her baby in tow, and heads west toward Las Vegas in search of the mother whose absence helped deform her sense of love and worth. What begins as a physical escape quickly becomes a spiritual and emotional reckoning, with a Route 66 diner, a sharp-tongued waitress named Oralyn, and a widening circle of unlikely helpers turning the novel into more than a chase story. Author Lori Keesey builds the book around pursuit, forgiveness, and providence, braiding domestic suspense with redemptive family drama and an overt current of Christian faith.
What I responded to most was the book’s sincerity. Keesey doesn’t write from a cool, ironic distance; she writes with her whole heart on the page, and that gives the novel a kind of old-fashioned voltage. Ginny’s fear feels bodily, not decorative, and Jacob’s manipulation is rendered with enough vanity and menace to make him feel less like a stock villain than a man rotted from the inside out. I also liked the way the novel lingers with side characters who could have been mere waystations. Oralyn and Monty, especially, give the book warmth, comic grain, and a lived-in small-town texture that keeps the story from becoming airless. The result is a road novel with a bruised, hopeful pulse.
I was also struck by how unapologetically the book insists on grace without softening the uglier facts of trauma. Its theology isn’t ornamental; it’s the engine. Sometimes that directness makes the novel feel a touch sermon-forward. But I admired the book for knowing exactly what it believes and for pressing that belief through every relationship in the story: mother and daughter, abuser and victim, stranger and rescuer, living and dead. By the end, the novel shifts from a mere escape narrative into something more searching and restorative, and that change gives it real force.
I would hand this to readers of Christian women’s fiction, inspirational suspense, faith-based family drama, redemptive road-trip fiction, and domestic emotional suspense, especially anyone who wants a novel about survival that refuses to leave healing as a vague afterthought. It reminded me less of a conventional thriller than of Francine Rivers at her most earnest, with a little of the heartland hospitality of Jan Karon carried onto the highway. Second Chance Highway is for readers who like their fiction wounded, watchful, and ultimately lit from within.
Pages: 386 | ISBN : 1684881609
