With unflinching honesty and heart, To Have and to Hold offers an achingly beautiful yet hope-filled portrait of one woman’s journey to motherhood. Brown writes with a rare tenderness and courage, shedding light on a subject often kept in the shadows. Readers will feel deeply seen within these pages and will be reminded of the fierce and enduring strength of a mother’s love—even before the first lullaby is sung.

—Janine Rosche, Selah Award-winning author of The Road before Us

Christian fiction author Deb Brown's debut novel, "To Have and To Hold," is a stunning, poignant novel about a loving couple experiencing the most exquisitely personal of human dramas—the longing for a child while facing the agonizing highs and lows of infertility. Deb Brown’s crisp writing is smart and poignant, painting powerful images and complex characters we cheer for and cry with. Most laudable is the masterful way she handles this delicate topic, with painful honesty, empathy, humor, and faith.

In “To Have and to Hold,” Deb Brown paints a sensitive and oh-so-real portrait of the rollercoaster that is infertility, pregnancy loss, and adoption. Those who have experienced any of these realities will recognize themselves in Amelia and Melvin: the stress, the conflict, the need for grace and forgiveness in marriage, the raging at God, and the difficulty of discerning how much to tell and to whom. Women who have gone through these experiences know that no matter what you tell or don’t tell others, the responses will always cause you further pain. This book should be required reading for all people of good will who have not walked this road. Perhaps it can bear fruit in a community of people better able to understand and support those who weather some of life’s most difficult journeys.

—Kathleen Basi, Author of A Song For The Road, traveling storyteller/musician, and composer of "Come, All You Thirsty," ACP's 2022 Song of the Year