Emma Bradshaw is in a bad place. Elementary school teacher and aspiring young adult novelist, Emma is currently about as low as she has ever been. Severely depressed since the death of her husband two years ago, she is about to give up on everything – her novel, her friends, and her life. While this seems like a viable option to her, Heaven appears to have other plans, and so the angels send Emma her own personal angel to get her back involved with life again.

Ted “Mac” McNabb isn’t really an angel. He’s more of an Apprentice Angel, and Emma is his first assignment on his road to his Personal Heaven. In life, Mac was Emma’s favorite author, but one pack of cigarettes too many, and he is somewhere between angel and ghost. He’s not exactly overjoyed about it, either. He’s got a stubborn woman to help and an interfering Archangel on his back, and only the threat of Purgatory is keeping him from telling Gabriel to stuff it…sideways.

Will Emma allow Mac to guide her towards a happier and more fulfilling life? She’s pretty sure that she must be going crazy when she starts seeing handsome dead guys at her coffee shop. It’s going to take more than just a little gentle persuasion for Mac to convince her to trust his guidance, but if he fails, he might never make it to his Personal Heaven.

Caitlyn Hunter’s Unwilling Angel is a story about a woman reclaiming her life after the devastating death of her husband. She has a little help in the form of the angel of her favorite novelist, but essentially she must decide for herself that her life is worth living again. This is a sweet story that is quite humorous in places, and the two main characters are very appealing. Emma’s internal conversations reveal a wry wit, and her somewhat barbed interactions with Mac show her to be stubborn and rather feisty as well. Mac is equal to her in strength of personality and has a comic edge of grumpiness to him that is very entertaining. He is definitely not the angel Clarence from It’s a Wonderful Life. When he argues with the Archangel Gabriel, readers will root for him to get the best of the Archangel, even though we realize that arguing with an angel is a self-defeating exercise.

This story is not all conversations with an angel, however. Ms. Hunter adds a dash of danger to the story that will keep the reader from getting too bogged down in philosophical musings, and it is just enough to add an element of suspense at the end. Overall, readers will find Unwilling Angel to be a charming story that is both entertaining and amusing.

Reviewed by: Whitney