Loch Ewe, 1940. When gamekeeper’s daughter Flora’s remote highland village finds itself the base for the Royal Navy’s Arctic convoys, life in her close-knit community changes forever. In defiance of his disapproving father, the laird’s son falls in love with Flora, and as tensions build in their disrupted home, any chance of their happiness seems doomed.
Decades later, Flora’s daughter, singer Lexie Gordon, is forced to return to the village and to the tiny cottage where she grew up. Having long ago escaped to the bright lights of the West End, London still never truly felt like home. Now back, with a daughter of her own, Lexie learns that her mother—and the hostile-seeming village itself—have long been hiding secrets that make her question everything she thought she knew.
As she pieces together the fragments of her parents’ story, Lexie discovers the courageous, devastating sacrifices made in her name. It’s too late to rekindle her relationship with her mother, but can Lexie find it in her heart to forgive the past, to grieve for all that’s lost, and finally find her place in the world?
I seldom say this but this is a book that suffers from being too short. The premise is super: two parallel storylines, with one taking place in Scotland during the Second World War, about Flora Gordon and her burgeoning romance with the only son of the local laird. The other “modern” storyline takes place in the same village, in the late seventies, and it’s about Flora’s daughter Lexie. She has returned to Scotland after her singing career in the West End has been cut short, and she is now a single mother. It’s evident that she doesn’t know everything about her parents’ history and there is, indeed, a twist towards the end. The characters are engaging, and likeable, aside from when they’re not supposed to be, but for a book with no shortage of tragic deaths, there is a real lack of emotional depth.
A lot of the themes in this book are explored only at a superficial level. For all of the loss, and all of the drama, including an accident and a near-accident in the ‘modern’ storyline and a surprise murder in the historic storyline, the stakes never feel that high. Everything is resolved too quickly and too neatly. While I enjoyed Lexie’s romance with Davy, it certainly isn’t an all-consuming love affair and I could say the same about Flora’s romance with Alec. The best part of the book is probably the friendship between Flora, Mairi and Bridie.
The book is well written. I didn’t do myself any favours by picking it up randomly over a period of four months; it probably deserves a more committed reader than that. It’s a relatively easy read but it feels as though a great deal of this story went untold. It’s really evident that the author did her research; the detail is fantastic and, truth be told, the 1940s setting feels more immediate and vibrant than the 1970s setting, which is told in the first person. Perhaps it’s that Flora isn’t the most compelling narrator, but it’s a book that I don’t think lives up to its potential.
While I will look out for this author’s books in future, I’m not in a wild rush to do so.
Rating: 3 stars (needs more melodrama)
TL;DR: Single mother returns to her late mother’s home, pursues romance with local chap, seems wholly unperturbed by family drama.
whelmed.blog 