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| 📕10-word summary: Dual-timeline, multi-generational story reveals consequential, brutal, and grave family secrets. 🖌6-word review: Compelling story with pronoun antecedent issues. |
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| 💭Favorite quote: “Kit was taken aback, because maternal concern is not an armament Lucinda keeps in her quiver.” | |||||||||
| 🎓Some new-to-me words: stagecraft, insouciance, shoulder season, traif, harridan | |||||||||
| Description:* In 1959, Hollywood ingenue Mercy Welles seems to have the world at her feet. Far removed from her Nebraska roots, she has crafted herself into a glamorous Oscar-nominated actress engaged to an up-and-coming director… until she shockingly vanishes without a trace, just as her career is taking off. Almost 60 years later, Kit O’Neill, a junior Manhattan television producer, is packing up her recently deceased grandmother’s attic, only to discover a long-lost box of souvenirs that reveal that the grandmother who raised her and her sister Claire was, in fact, the mysterious Mercy Welles. Putting her investigative skills to use, Kit is determined to solve the riddle of her grandmother’s missing life, and the trail eventually leads to Martha’s Vineyard.*From goodreads.com’s synopsis. | |||||||||
| Thoughts: I suppose I was destined to read this book for several reasons: 1) I saw it in my 3/27/25 BookBub email and went to put it on my to-read list at the library, where I found it already there from my 7/29/24 BookBub email. 2) I’m a sucker for stories about found letters. 3) I have a great fondness for stories about The Cape in general, and Martha’s Vineyard, Nantucket, & Provincetown in particular, probably because I grew up just off The Cape in Fall River, and my husband and I spent a month at a VRBO in Eastham during the pandemic. In this dual-timeline story, I found the storyline in the past more interesting than the one in the present, but both kept me interested. The only complaint I had was that there were several times when a pronoun’s antecedent wasn’t clear. For example, a paragraph talked about 2 female characters, and the subsequent paragraph referred only to “she” (4 times), and I wasn’t sure which of the 2 characters it was referring to until the end of the paragraph. And finally, my pet-peeve word showed up a quarter of the way into the book: “Well,” she said almost conspiratorially, “it’s just we don’t see Mint out that much anymore. She rarely leaves Sycamore.” | |||||||||
See the rest of the books I’ve read in 2025 and previous years: 2024 | 2023 | 2022 | 2021 | 2020 | 2019.