Review: Wouldn’t Change A Thing – Stacy Campbell

I received this book for free from in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.

One woman’s seemingly perfect life is upended when her biggest secret—her mother is paranoid schizophrenic—becomes front-page news. With a penchant for lying, how can she turn her life around after so much deception?

Antoinette “Toni” Williams is beyond cloud nine. A successful architect, she is s...

One woman’s seemingly perfect life is upended when her biggest secret—her mother is paranoid schizophrenic—becomes front-page news. With a penchant for lying, how can she turn her life around after so much deception?

Antoinette “Toni” Williams is beyond cloud nine. A successful architect, she is set to marry the love of her life, Lamonte Dunlap, Jr. But on the morning of her engagement party, Toni’s world comes crashing down when her family’s long-held secret of mental illness is exposed on the front page of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

Friends scatter, contracts dry up, and Toni is forced to face the truth about her shattered family. Lamonte assures her he will stick by her side, but Toni is embarrassed and ashamed. The only thing to do, she decides, is to return to her hometown of Sparta, Georgia, to face her inner demons—and her institutionalized mother—that she’s spent twenty-three years avoiding. As she reconnects with family and townsfolk, Toni learns you can always go home; the question is, what will you find when you get there?

A provocative and heartbreaking tale of family, illness, deception, and love, Wouldn’t Change a Thing explores the ties that bind and one woman’s harrowing and ultimately redemptive journey back home.

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Wouldn’t Change A Thing is a beautiful novel thorough and thorough. As beautiful as it is, this book is also heartbreaking. Things happen for a reason. And sometimes, the one thing you think has been right all along isn’t. Have you ever realized that if one thing in your whole life didn’t happen right when it did, your life would have been entirely different? This started out with Toni getting subtly dumped in her own engagement party, just in front of everybody. If that wasn’t the worst, all through the night she believed that she and her ex-fiancé will prove her ex-soon-to-be-mother-in-law¬. Turns out it wasn’t like that and this dude actually threw her stuff away and even called police accusing her of stalking him. Great, I know. Toni is a strong-willed woman and is just as stubborn. She’s awesome, in general and we have to give it to her for being strong and keeping her head high through it all. AND she has awesome parents. Okay, her aunt and uncle were also cool but come on, Clayton and Russell and really cool people. The romance here was just the beginning of an even more beautiful journey.

Let me get this now, I love the ending. The book wasn’t an easy ride. It had a lot of ups and downs especially with her mother. Actually, that’s where this book went around. Her mother, the struggles of trying to take care of her mother. More on to her family. And I love that about this book. I love how she moved on from the useless relationship with what’s-his-name and decided to rekindle her family ties while waiting for her business to pick up again. This book involved a lot of moving on and looking far on the brighter side of life and that’s what makes it so beautiful. Life isn’t about what knocked you down or how long you stayed on the ground. It’s more about the effort of picking yourself up and swinging better than you were before.

Wouldn’t Change a Thing is very well written and had lovable characters. I love the character development in everyone and… just the whole book itself, really. I honestly didn’t like reading in her mother’s POV but I understood the whole point of it. I didn’t appreciate some of the people in the background because really, they’re not worth it but you know how life goes. Some people need to mess up with your life because just imagine how uneventful life would be without them.

(Ex. That b!t(# of a woman who almost became her mother-in-law and that b@$t*^d who called himself a priest.) And remember, anyone who can’t accept you/your family for you/they are, he/she is not worth it.

Reviewed by: Reneth

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