A grieving husband who is struggling with writer’s block after his wife Abby, an investigative journalist who’s been getting threats, disappeared one year ago on the night he made the New York Times bestseller list, Grady Green jumps at the chance Kitty, his agent and Abby’s godmother, gives him to get out of his pathetic hotel room in London and spend three months on the Isle of Amberly off the Scottish Highlands in the writing shed of a late author who willed it to her. Even before he reaches its shores, he gets his first sighting of who he believes is Abby. Is it a hallucination, a ghost, or a result of his alcoholism? As it turns out, this is just the beginning of the strange happenings on the small island, its only full-time inhabitants about 25 women who are both mysterious and disturbing. There’s plenty of tension as Grady realizes that he’s essentially trapped with no phone service and a ferry that runs at the whim of the captain who seems determined to keep him from leaving.
Through a series of flashbacks in both Grady’s and his wife Abby’s voices, we get a sense of the state of their marriage before she vanished. There was definitely love but, contrary to what Grady professes, his writing had been his primary focus. Like any good psychological thriller, Feeney kept me on the edge of my seat, but I never anticipated the twists near the end. This isn’t my usual genre, but I appreciated the way Feeney set up the story and her eerie depiction of Amberly. Recommended.
I received a complimentary ARC of this book from Flatiron Books through NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. Opinions expressed are completely my own.
Just after Fiona Abry and her brother Daniel make a bet over who will find and accept love first, Fiona’s hippy dippy mother Buttercup, who abandoned her at age 6, comes for a very brief visit and gifts her a long-lost family heirloom, the first pocket watch made by Adolphus Abry, founder of the family’s watch company. According to her great-great-uncle Leo, who gave her mother the watch to pass on to her, if Fiona falls asleep holding it, “it will show you your heart’s desire. And then once you’ve dreamed it, you can grasp it.” Next thing she knows, she’s waking up on an isolated Caribbean island in bed with a stranger, Aaron, and mother to two children. To further confound things, she looks like the woman whose body she seems to be possessing. Over the course of the summer, she revisits the island nightly in vivid dreams, never knowing how much time has passed, if any, and slowly falling for Aaron.
There were a couple of minor issues that kept this from being a 5* read for me. It frustrated me how unintentionally cruel Fiona was by not being honest with Aaron about who she is, causing him such incredible hurt. Also, as a huge fan of Jillian and Daniel Abry, the couple from Ghosted, it is disappointing that this story takes place before they meet, so readers don’t get to revisit with them.
As always, though, Sarah Ready does an incredible job of crafting romances that defy time, space, and logic. In this third book of the Ghosted series, there are so many twists that readers are left guessing until the end whether Fiona’s dream guy, Aaron, is real but in another dimension or just a figment of her imagination. Highly recommended!
I received a complimentary ARC of this book from Swift & Lewis Publishing through Netgalley in exchange for an honest review. Opinions expressed are completely my own.
5*
This beautiful story was not at all what I expected. It’s about the Presbyterian ministers who broke from the established church in protest against the system of patronage (wealthy landowners could install their own ministers in parishes on their estates) and formed their own Free Church. However, they gave up their homes and their salaries (emoluments), so had to find alternate ways to earn income and funds for new church buildings until their congregations were self-sustainable.
John Ferguson is one such minister who asks his brother-in-law if he knows of any work and ends up taking on the job of evicting the last inhabitant of a desolate Scottish island that the greedy British landlord wants to use for raising sheep. The story takes place towards the end of The Clearances, a punitive, inhumane practice begun after the Battle of Culloden in the mid-1700s that forced (often burned) Scottish people out of their homes and, if they survived, either onto land that was barren and ill-suited for farming or onto ships bound for the U.S., Canada and Australia.
The day after John arrives on the island, he falls off a cliff and the following day, Ivar finds him, tends to his wounds, and nurses him back to health. In their weeks together, they use pantomime and other visual clues to learn each other’s language and form a strong bond. There’s a surprising twist at the end that I didn’t see coming.
At just over 200 pages, this is a compact story that portrays the emotional toll The Clearances took on the Scottish people and what can happen when a good man takes on a task that is anathema to his moral compass and sees the human side of a tragedy up close rather than through the lens of greed. It’s a beautiful, atmospheric tale that, in little ways, is reminiscent of movies like The Banshees of Inisherin, Portrait of a Lady on Fire, and The Piano. Highly recommended.
I received a complimentary ARC of this book from Scribner through NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. Opinions expressed are completely my own.
4*
Cleo Wilder, a newspaper columnist who has spent the past few years reporting on a series of failed dates, is sent to a remote Irish island prior to her 30th birthday to marry herself in a self-coupling ceremony. However, instead of the idyllic luxury cabin that’s been reserved for her voyage of self-discovery, she’s been double-booked with Mack Sullivan, a gruff American photographer with a striking resemblance to Han Solo. He’s there to discover and document his roots while also giving himself and his estranged wife some distance because it is painful for him not to be under the same roof as his sons whom he deeply loves.
Although the first impression of Cleo is selfish and whiney, in time it becomes clear that her fear of her impending birthday and need for Salvation Island’s isolation have deeper significance, making the standoff between her and Mack more balanced. As they spend time together, initially on opposite sides of their chalk line boundary, they share three things about themselves each night and slowly come to appreciate and grow comfortable with each other.
It’s clear early on that this isn’t a typical romance since Mack is married and still at least a little in love with his wife. The moral ambiguity will undoubtedly elicit a range of reactions from readers, but the language Silver instills in her characters is poetic, heartfelt, and enchanting. It is refreshing to witness a couple handle their emotions and actions with maturity and consideration for others (although I guarantee debate on this opinion).
Like any good work of women’s fiction, the female friendships are front and center in the island’s knitting group and the men are equally welcoming and supportive. As Mack says in his speech at his exhibition, the Salvation Island inhabitants could have been very clannish and suspicious but, instead, were very welcoming unique characters who provided warmth on this beautiful, but cold, harsh island.
As for the self-coupling ceremony that seemed very self-indulgent on the surface, it actually proved to be a lovely expression of self-love and a celebration of the next chapter of Cleo’s life. After almost two months, she gains the clarity to realize that the noisy, frenetic pace and superficiality of relationships in London are no longer sustaining her and that her dream of writing a novel can come true with the island and her newfound friends as her muses.
In the spirit of the book’s “three things,” here are mine:
One, the colorful cast of characters who inhabit Salvation Island
Two, the emotional parting between Cleo and Mack and their need to stay connected via text by continuing their “three things” conversations, and
Three, Silver’s poetic descriptions of the rugged beauty of this wild Irish island
…and Four (even if Mack doesn’t like them), a wish for an extended epilogue several years later. You’ll understand why after you finish the book!
I received a complimentary ARC of this book from Ballantine Books through NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. Opinions expressed are completely my own.
