Reviewer: Annie
I received a review copy
Summary:
The New York Times bestselling author of A Long Time Gone now explores a Southern family’s buried history, which will change the life of the woman who unearths it, secret by shattering secret.
It has been two years since the death of Merritt Heyward’s husband, Cal, when she receives unexpected news—Cal’s family home in Beaufort, South Carolina, bequeathed by Cal’s reclusive grandmother, now belongs to Merritt.
Charting the course of an uncertain life—and feeling guilt from her husband’s tragic death—Merritt travels from her home in Maine to Beaufort, where the secrets of Cal’s unspoken-of past reside among the pluff mud and jasmine of the ancestral Heyward home on the Bluff. This unknown legacy, now Merritt’s, will change and define her as she navigates her new life—a new life complicated by the arrival of her too young stepmother and ten-year-old half-brother.
Soon, in this house of strangers, Merritt is forced into unraveling the Heyward family past as she faces her own fears and finds the healing she needs in the salt air of the Low Country.
Review:
While this book was a tough sell out the gate (because, I was rather confused about the two Cal’s, and who were who and what and where and when), it was well worth pushing through. It is a magnificent story of the slow healing of a broken family. I began to care for Merritt Heyward as she was beginning to care for herself.
Karen White introduces us to Merritt’s very young Stepmother; Loralee, her 10 year old half-brother; Owen, and her brother-in-law, Gibbes. Merritt’s husband, Cal never spoke of his past, so she had a lot to learn about her husband, his family and why he left South Carolina to live in Maine.
Merritt married Cal Heyward in Maine, and two years after his death, she is called to Beaufort to claim his family home as her own. She believes this is her chance at a fresh start, and she does not want anything getting in the way, including her very own family or Cal’s for that matter.
Merritt is not there a day before she gets a knock on the door that will change everything she thinks of herself, her husband and what family really means.
I got lost between the pages…..brilliant writing.
4 Stars
