Never Saw You Coming was all over my Instagram feed ahead of it’s release, so I looked into the premise and immediately knew I needed to read this Erin Hahn novel. It deals with a lot of topics that have been conversations among me and my church friends over the last few months and years.

Never Saw You Coming is a split-perspective novel, showing us the world through Meg and Micah’s eyes. Meg is an 18-year-old girl who just learned the man she thought was her father, isn’t biologically linked to her at all. Her mom got pregnant during a teenage fling, and that guy died before Meg’s birth. Upset with what feels like a hypocritical life on her mom’s part, she runs off to the UP (Upper Peninsula, if you’re not familiar with Michigan-speak), to meet her biological family, and ends up meeting Micah too.

Micah has his own struggles with the church community. His father was a pastor, until he was convicted of predatory behavior with women and stealing money from the church. Micah’s dad went to prison when he was in junior high, and now nearly six year’s later, there’s a possibility his estranged father could get out on probation. Micah isn’t too excited about the possibility due to the way people in the church treated his family in the wake of the scandal.

Meg and Micah aren’t just falling in love through this story. They are processing their deep hurts from the church. It’s a conversation more people need to have because there is so much in the typical church behavior that turns into trauma. The judgement, the double standards, the impossible standards, the pressures of purity culture… all of it. This novel touches on those topics and more.

It’s refreshing to see that struggle depicted on the page, although some people might feel like it’s too churchy. There is a lot of churchiness in there, but the critique is necessary no matter what your faith background is. I think it’s important to take a look at the constructs we’ve built and the long-term impacts they create.

Never Saw You Coming was such a fast read for me, and one I recommended to some friends immediately… probably because it felt so personal to me. As a homeschooled kid from Michigan who grew up extremely sheltered (among many other similarities), I was wondering if Hahn was stalking me. lol. I’d definitely recommend this to anyone who is healing from Evangelical trauma themselves so they can feel seen, or know someone who is recovering so they can better understand.

Reminder: LiteraryHypeWoman is an Amazon affiliate site, so I can receive a commission from qualifying purchases through my links.