Book Review: "Waiting for Daybreak" by Kathryn Cushman

Who needs doctor drama when you have pharmacy crisis?

Paige and Clarissa are two women who work in a small town pharmacy. Both have different goals and pasts they are trying to hide. Paige wants to erase her past that cost her previous job while trying to help out her mother who is very sick. Clarissa wants to move away to the big city and open her own pharmacy but is stuck in the small town. When Clarissa's grandfather hires Paige, Clarissa deems her to be too good to be true and tries to find out Paige's secret. Determined to get away from the family business and into the big city, Clarissa tries to set up Paige and bring her down.

After working in a doctor's office, I have the greatest respect now for pharmacists and this book cemented my respect. I have no clue how they are able to interpret doctors' handwriting. It looks like illegible scrawl done by a chicken sometimes and for the pharmacist to translate it into something that goes into a human body is just amazing. The story in this book involving the misinterpretation of medical drugs and dosage is a timely and important issue. It brings up the question about who is the one at fault? Is it the doctor who wrote down the wrong RX or is it the pharmacist who was merely following what the doctor wrote? The conflict and competition between the two women was very well done. I kept finding myself disliking Clarissa throughout the entire books. Her entrance in the story garnered some sympathy but throughout the book her character just kept irritating me. Her lack of customer service was appalling especially since she seemed not to care about what she was doing.

On the other hand I liked Paige very much. I felt sorry for her and I wanted her to rise above what she was doing. Her customer service was what people need when they go to a small town pharmacy. She had incredible patience for the rude customers and handled them better than I ever could! The only real problem I had with this book was I felt that if everyone had been upfront from the beginning, all the drama and problems in the story could have been avoided. Of course that means much of the story would have been eliminated then. It's just sometimes I feel that the characters make things harder for themselves when they don't divulge necessary information. With this story, if the two women had just told each other even just a little bit about their ambitions, they probably would have been good friends from the beginning and would try to help each other to succeed in what they really wanted. Overall, I liked the story very much. It was my first book by Kathryn Cushman and I would say her books are comparable to that of Karen Kingsbury. I'm looking forward to what she has to offer in the future.

Waiting for Daybreak by Kathryn Cushman is published by Bethany House (2008)