Between Sundays Review

Between Sundays review: football fame, foster care, and the test of character

This Between Sundays review argues that Karen Kingsbury's novel is more effective as an inspirational family drama than as a conventional romance or sports story. The hook is commercial and easy to grasp: a famous quarterback, a foster child who believes the impossible, a hardworking woman trying to build a home, and a veteran player whose private burdens matter more than the season's headlines. But the book's real interest lies in what it does with those ingredients. Between Sundays asks whether public talent means anything if it is not matched by private decency, and that question gives the novel more shape than its sentimental packaging might suggest.

Kingsbury builds the story around Aaron Hill, a star quarterback whose life has been arranged around visibility, appetite, and self-regard. Around him she places three people who alter the scale of the narrative: Megan Gunn, who is trying to care for and adopt the boy left to her by a dying friend; Cory, whose belief that Aaron is his father is both heartbreaking and disruptive; and Derrick Anderson, an older player whose investment in foster children and whose own urgent promise give the book a second moral line. The result is a novel that keeps one eye on romance and another on accountability, grief, and chosen family.

The critical thesis is straightforward. Between Sundays succeeds when it narrows its gaze from inspirational uplift in the abstract to the concrete needs of a child, the fatigue of caregiving, and the embarrassing smallness of a man who has been praised too easily for too long. It is weaker when it turns too neatly toward message, smoothing complexity into reassurance. Even so, it has a recognizable emotional architecture, and readers who meet it as a faith-forward story about responsibility rather than as a realistic football novel are likely to get the best from it.

What Karen Kingsbury understands about the novel's premise

The smartest thing Kingsbury does is refuse to let football remain the whole point of the book. Aaron's celebrity matters because it distorts the way he sees himself and the way others see him. Stadium glamour, money, and media attention create a world in which he can mistake being admired for being good. That makes him a useful protagonist for inspirational fiction, because his transformation has to involve more than falling in love. He has to be stripped of the illusion that charm and athletic accomplishment are equivalent to character.

That is why Cory is such an important presence. A child who believes Aaron is his father is not merely a cute narrative device; he is the force that collapses Aaron's emotional distance. Cory wants belonging, permanence, and protection, and the novel understands that those needs expose the poverty of Aaron's self-involvement more sharply than any locker-room conflict could. Kingsbury does not need elaborate psychological machinery to make that work. She only needs to keep Aaron in contact with a child whose longing cannot be brushed off without moral consequence.

Megan strengthens the premise for similar reasons. She is not in the story simply to provide romantic chemistry. She represents labor, steadiness, and the daily burden of caring for someone who depends on you completely. When the novel is at its best, Megan's exhaustion and persistence rebalance the book. They move it away from fantasy and toward lived stakes. A wealthy athlete can recover from public embarrassment. A foster child and the woman trying to give him a future do not have that luxury.

Derrick, meanwhile, gives the book an older and sadder register. His long connection to foster children and his determination to keep a promise place Aaron's immaturity against a more seasoned model of masculine responsibility. That comparison is one of the novel's most useful pieces of design. It keeps the story from becoming only a makeover for one arrogant man. Instead, it becomes a contrast between different ways of inhabiting success, faith, and duty.

Aaron Hill is the novel's risk and its opportunity

Aaron is not the kind of hero readers are meant to admire immediately, and that is one of the book's advantages. He begins from vanity, comfort, and the assumption that life exists to affirm him. For an inspirational romance, that is a productive place to start. Kingsbury needs room for moral movement, and Aaron supplies it. The question is not whether he is flawed; it is whether the book can make his change feel earned rather than merely assigned by the plot.

For much of the novel, Aaron functions as a man whose shallowness has gone unchallenged because his talent makes challenge inconvenient for everyone around him. That familiar setup could easily become flat. What gives it some life is that Kingsbury attaches his growth to other people's need instead of to private angst alone. Aaron is not simply bored with fame or vaguely empty inside. He is forced into proximity with Megan, Cory, and Derrick, and that proximity asks him to notice the difference between being a star on Sunday and being useful on an ordinary day.

This is also where readers may divide. Kingsbury favors emotional directness over ambiguity, so Aaron's lessons arrive clearly. Readers who want a psychologically knotty portrait of masculinity, celebrity, or fatherhood will not find that here. Aaron is not drawn with the layered unease of literary fiction. He is drawn to be understood, corrected, and finally softened. In stricter critical terms, that can feel schematic.

Yet schematic is not the same as ineffective. In a novel like this, clarity has a function. Aaron's appeal depends on whether the reader believes he can move from self-display to service. Kingsbury is less interested in preserving ironic distance than in making that transition legible. The result is a character arc that may feel predictable but is often emotionally coherent. Readers who enjoy broad but sincere redemption stories will likely accept the trade.

Megan and Cory give the book its emotional center

If Aaron provides the narrative engine, Megan and Cory provide the heart. Megan's situation carries the novel's most immediate stakes because she is trying to turn provisional care into durable family. Her world is made of work, fatigue, practical limits, and the fragile hope that love might become legally and emotionally secure. That is stronger material than celebrity angst, and Kingsbury seems to know it.

Cory, likewise, is crucial because he concentrates the book's themes into one vulnerable figure. His belief that Aaron is his father is not simply a misunderstanding to be tidied up. It expresses the scale of a child's need after loss. He wants a story large enough to repair the damage done to him, and in that sense he becomes the book's moral measure. Adults can speak of grace, sacrifice, and growth; Cory is the one who tests whether those words cost anything.

This is where Between Sundays separates itself a little from more routine inspirational romance. The book is not only asking whether two adults belong together. It is asking what kind of emotional world would actually be safe for a child shaped by grief and foster care. That gives the novel a family-drama seriousness that its marketing pitch might obscure. Readers coming for a celebrity romance may be surprised to find that the deepest tension is not erotic but domestic: who can be trusted, who will stay, and what kind of home can be built from uncertainty.

Megan's role in that question matters. She is written as competent, caring, and morally grounded, which means she does not exist merely to redeem Aaron through her patience. She also sets the standard he has to meet. That dynamic is one of the book's strengths. It keeps the romance from floating entirely free of ethical judgment. Megan's life is already full of consequence; anyone entering it has to become worthy of that consequence.

Readers drawn to relationship fiction centered on grief, family pressure, and female resilience may also find useful comparisons in A Good Woman and Love's Unending Legacy, though both approach duty and hope through different historical and tonal lenses.

Faith, sentiment, and the limits of the novel's simplicity

Kingsbury writes openly within the conventions of Christian inspirational fiction, and it would be a mistake to treat the faith dimension as ornamental. The title itself points to the governing idea: what matters is not public performance on the most visible day of the week, but the quality of the life lived in the days around it. In other words, the book is not merely using Christian language as atmosphere. It is structuring its moral argument around habits of character, sacrifice, and grace.

That openness is a strength for the intended audience. Kingsbury is not coy about belief, and she does not turn spiritual concern into metaphor for readers who would prefer the novel to stay secular. The appeal of Between Sundays lies partly in that frankness. Readers who want faith to operate as a real motivational force in fiction will find the book honest about its commitments.

The limit is that frankness can flatten complexity. Kingsbury often prefers sincerity to tension, uplift to contradiction, and clarity to uncertainty. The prose is readable, but it is rarely searching. Emotional beats tend to be announced rather than discovered through subtle shifts in language or structure. For some readers, that will feel comforting and accessible. For others, it will feel like the novel has chosen reassurance too quickly.

This matters especially because the book touches material that could sustain sharper treatment: foster care, grief, male vanity, public image, and the mismatch between religious language and actual conduct. A more severe novel might press harder on those contradictions. Between Sundays generally chooses redemption over abrasion. That is not automatically a flaw; it is the contract the book offers. Still, readers who prefer fiction that leaves more residue of doubt may want something rougher at the edges.

For a more searching account of how family structures and social expectations wound people, A Woman Is No Man offers a much harsher and more complex experience. For readers staying within the warmer, more restorative end of the spectrum, our romance reviews provide closer tonal neighbors.

The sports setting helps most when it stays in the background

One of the book's subtler strengths is that football gives Kingsbury a convincing public world without requiring the novel to become sports fiction in a narrow sense. Aaron's career supplies money, ego, routine, and media spectacle. Derrick's long professional life adds discipline, wear, and legacy. Those elements matter because they define how these men move through the world and how easily they can mistake performance for meaning.

But readers looking for intricate game strategy, locker-room realism, or a deeply textured portrait of professional sports culture should calibrate expectations. Football in Between Sundays is more thematic frame than technical subject. It establishes contrast. Sundays are visible, rewarded, and publicly narrated; the days between them contain the quieter tests that actually reveal who a person is. Kingsbury uses the sport well at that symbolic level.

That makes the book sports-adjacent rather than fully sports-driven. The field is important because it magnifies Aaron's emptiness and Derrick's commitments, not because the novel wants to linger over athletic systems or competitive detail. For many readers, that is a benefit. It keeps the emphasis on relationships and moral change. For others, especially readers who came hoping the football world would be rendered with more depth and friction, it may feel somewhat decorative.

Even so, the setting helps distinguish the book from interchangeable contemporary romances. Fame is not just a glamorous surface here; it is a condition that delays adulthood. That is a smart use of sports celebrity, and it gives the novel a sharper angle than it would have had if Aaron were merely another wealthy, emotionally stunted hero in generic contemporary fiction.

Readers who tend to browse the border between relationship fiction and more socially grounded novels may want to move from this book into our literary fiction reviews for stories that push harder on consequence and ambiguity.

Who this novel fits, and what alternatives may suit other readers better

The best audience for Between Sundays is readers who want emotionally explicit fiction shaped by faith, family, and redemption. Those readers are likely to appreciate that the novel keeps its moral stakes visible. They may also value the fact that the story's central child is not an accessory but the source of its deepest urgency. If the appeal of Karen Kingsbury lies in tenderness, legibility, and restorative endings earned through struggle, this book delivers that package in a recognizable form.

Readers should be more cautious if they want a romance first and everything else second. The book has romantic movement, but its emotional center is broader than couple formation. Foster care, caregiving, and male moral education take up as much space as attraction does. Likewise, readers who want stylistic elegance, moral uncertainty, or a more bruising realism may find the novel too smooth in its storytelling.

That does not make the book slight. It makes it specific. Between Sundays belongs to a tradition of accessible inspirational fiction that values emotional communication over formal surprise. Judged inside that tradition, it is a solid and often effective novel because it anchors its message in people rather than in abstract sermonizing. Judged against more demanding literary standards, it is limited by its preference for simplicity and resolution.

As alternatives, readers who want another faith-leaning family-centered romance can try Love's Unending Legacy. Readers who want grief and reinvention in a more historical register can look at A Good Woman. Readers who want relationship fiction with a tougher social edge can move further outward from Kingsbury's warmth and into more challenging shelves from the site's literary fiction collection.

Final assessment

Between Sundays is not a subtle novel, and it is not trying to be one. Its strengths are sincerity, clarity, and a genuinely useful decision to place foster care and everyday responsibility at the center of a story that could easily have settled for celebrity romance. Karen Kingsbury understands that Aaron's fame matters chiefly as a test: if a man is admired in public but inattentive in private, what is that admiration worth?

The answer the novel gives is overtly inspirational, sometimes overly neat, and often affecting anyway. Cory and Megan keep the book grounded in need rather than fantasy, Derrick adds moral ballast, and Aaron's arc is persuasive enough to carry the story even when the prose remains plain. Readers open to Christian fiction that values grace, sacrifice, and emotional accessibility over complexity will find a novel with a sturdy heart.

For that reason, Between Sundays is worth reading less as a football romance than as a book about whether love can become responsibility and whether belief can survive translation into ordinary conduct. That is a modest ambition, but it is a real one, and Kingsbury serves it better here than the glossy premise initially suggests.