Alexandrea Weis, author of "The NOLA SERIES", "What Sacrifice Means To Me'

What Sacrifice Means to Me

“Love. The word felt like a thunderbolt piercing my insides and rendering my heart from my soul. How could I tell him what that word meant to me? Like so many inept poets and philosophers before me, I was waylaid by the overpowering presence of such an emotion. But my recollections of love were not the chubby cherub laden, red heart encounters so often depicted on sappy Valentine’s Day cards. Love to me was a black enshrouding veil of mourning that embraced your heart in an aching perpetual winter. Love was loss to me. Love was death to me. For all I had ever loved had left me, and my heart had never fully recovered.” Pg 17, Sacrifice

     In Sacrifice, the third installment of the Nicci Beauvoir series out now, Nicci comes face to face with her own feelings about love. She searches for her understanding of what true love is and has to make a decision about how she wants to spend the rest of her life. But like so many of us, after the clouds of despair have lifted, a new set of questions suddenly pervades Nicci’s thoughts. Instead of asking why she has suffered through such a terrible loss, she starts asking what if my life had been different? Questions about the choices we have made in life and the path we have chosen often follow periods of mourning and loss. And so Nicci Beauvoir, awakens from her own winter of confusion, to begin to wonder what it is she really wants for herself and who she wants to spend the rest of her life with. In Sacrifice, we see Nicci changed and strengthened by her grief. She begins to search inside of herself for the answers about life. In the end, tragedy always transforms us by making us re-evaluate what is really important in our lives. As I learned after the devastation of Katrina, things do not matter, people do.  And I wanted Nicci’s transformation to reflect the post-Katrina attitude now found in the city of New Orleans. After the storm, we learned as a community that it is not the monuments or antiquated architecture that makes a city; it is the people that give it its strength. And in Sacrifice Nicci Beauvoir realizes that her strength comes from those around her. She learns to define herself by the love that encompasses her life. And from that strength, she is able to start down a new road and mold herself into the kind of person we all know we can be. A shame it takes a heart-wrenching disaster for many of us to rise like a phoenix from the ashes and grasp this valuable lesson, but I guess in the end it is better we face this truth before we lose what we never realized we had.