Yay for another blog tour! I’m so freaking excited every single time whenever I get an email saying I’ve been accepted to be a part of a tour. Seriously, it makes me so freaking happy, so yeah. Keep inviting me and accepting me to blog tours and I’ll jump on them so quickly. Thank you as always to the amazing women at Fantastic Flying Book Tours for hosting this tour, and for always being so responsive and professional and just awesome throughout every single tour. Click on the banner above to see the tour schedule, and you should totally sign up to be a host!

The last thing eighteen-year-old Wilhelmina “Willa” MacCarthy wants is to be a nun. It’s 1936, and as the only daughter amongst four sons, her Irish–Catholic family is counting on her to take her vows—but Willa’s found another calling. Each day she sneaks away to help Doctor Katherine Winston in her medical clinic in San Francisco’s Richmond District.

Keeping secrets from her family only becomes more complicated when Willa agrees to help the doctor at a field hospital near the new bridge being built over the Golden Gate. Willa thinks she can handle her new chaotic life, but as she draws closer to a dashing young ironworker and risks grow at the bridge, she discovers that hiding from what she truly wants may be her biggest lie of all.

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Amy Trueblood grew up in California only ten minutes from Disneyland which sparked an early interest in storytelling. As the youngest of five, she spent most of her time trying to find a quiet place to curl up with her favorite books. After graduating from the University of Arizona with a degree in journalism, she worked in entertainment in Los Angeles before returning to work in Arizona.

Fueled by good coffee and an awesome Spotify playlist, you can often find Amy blogging and writing. Nothing But Sky, a 2018 Junior Library Guild selection, is her first novel.

Disclaimer: I voluntarily read and reviewed an advanced copy of this book. All thoughts and opinions are my own. Thank you to Flux and Fantastic Flying Book Tours for this free copy.

This was a book where I couldn’t help but root for the main character, mostly because she had to hide her passion for studying anatomy from her hella religious Irish family. To me, having a character, especially a teenage girl, having to conform to society’s norms and her family’s rules because of no real good reason at all irks me so much, and it makes me want them to just rebel in the best way.

I know that’s not how I usually start a review but I had to say that. I think that’s what really made me like Willa, and I just wish that her parents didn’t have a religious stick up their ass to the point that they wanted to send her to a convent after she turned eighteen.

I mean, she saved her brother from bleeding out to death for crying out loud. That’s how the book starts basically. She’s listening to her mother and the local priest talk about how she’s so excited to take her vows to become a nun – yeah, that’s a lie. Isn’t lying a sin in the Catholic faith? – and she hears one of her brothers screaming at the top of his lungs because whoa there.

He cut off two of his fingers. Well, not the whole fingers, but enough that he almost lost too much blood.

None of the other family members knew what to do, and they didn’t even spring into action to take him to the local doctor to save his life. But Willa did.

She even did a makeshift tourniquet to stop the bleeding as much as possible until the doctor was able to help him. And lo and behold, the former local doctor retired months ago and who else is there to help him but a new woman doctor named Dr. Catherine Winston.

At that point, Willa knew that her dream of working in the medical field was closer to being a reality than she thought, because here was a real life example right in front of her face. Not to mention Dr. Winston offered to mentor her?? How lucky is that?

This was an interesting book, and I liked that Willa was able to get some mentoring in from someone that she could really learn a lot from, and see herself as in a few years or so. It means so much more when you are able to see someone that is so much like you in a career that you want to do, because then you start to believe that if they can do it, so can you. I feel like that was a huge takeaway for me and I hope it is for other people that read this as well.

Thank you so much for reading my review on this book, fam! I appreciate you so much and I hope to hear some more of your thoughts below:

• Do you have a role model or a mentor in your life?
• Have you ever had to hide your passion from your family?
• What’s the one advice you would give someone when it comes to following their dreams?

I think those are pretty good questions. I wonder what you’ll say. Until next time, fam!