Tag: general fiction

Posted in Bookish and Bingeable

The Lost Girls of Ireland

Posted on by Vikki Lynn Sorensen

By Susanne O’Leary

The picturesque beach of Wild Rose Bay is the last place Lydia Butler thought she’d be. But having just lost everything, the run-down cottage she inherited from her Great Aunt Nellie is the only place she can take her daughter, Sunny. Hidden away in a tiny Irish village, she can protect Sunny from the gossip in Dublin, and the real reason they have nowhere else to live…

The cottage is part of the old coastguard station and other eccentric residents are quick to introduce themselves when Lydia arrives. Lydia instantly feels less alone, fascinated by the stories they have about Nellie, and she’s charmed by American artist, Jason O’Callaghan, the mysterious man who lives next door.

But the longer Lydia relaxes under the moonlit sky, the more the secret she’s keeping from Sunny threatens to come out. And as she finds herself running into Jason’s arms, she knows she must be honest and face up to the past she has tried to forget. Has she finally found people who will truly accept her, or will the truth force her to leave the cottage for good?

I love Ireland! I love everything about Ireland and cannot wait to go back there someday. It may seem weird to pick a book to read based on the setting. Yet, I did. Well, that and the synopsis. I was attracted to the story of a woman who’s lost everything and how she healed. I wanted to meet the residents of Wild Rose Bay. 

I didn’t hate it. I didn’t love it either. It was….ok. 

Lydia inherits a house from her great aunt and moves there with her daughter after her husband dies. There’s a tiny bit of a mystery surrounding the life her great aunt lived. I had hoped for more in that storyline but honestly, it wasn’t much. She simply fell in love with a German soldier whose plane crashed on the island. That was it. 

We meet our main character, Lydia, whose life has been full of fundraisers, dinner parties, designer clothes, opulent restaurants and an all-around higher class of living. She finds herself penniless after finding out her recently deceased husband was involved in several illegal business deals. Forced to sell all she has, she finds out she’s inherited a house in a small village. 

I really didn’t like Lydia at all. While we know she’s gone through a lot, there’s just no character growth. Her daughter solves most of their problems and what Sunny isn’t able to solve, everyone else in the village does. So, Lydia really doesn’t need to do much to adjust to this new life outside of working jobs she once thought were beneath her. She even inherits more money halfway through the story. There really isn’t a sense of struggling. 

There’s a love interest which seems really out of place and suddenly, really intense at the time when Lydia isn’t even sure she’s staying at the cottage. Jason seems odd and out of place and just as two dimensional as Lydia. 

I did like the setting. I love Irish cottages and have always dreamt of living in one. The seaside was atmospheric and chilly and altogether lovely. I also really liked the town and the people. I was more interested in their lives than Lydia’s. 

All in all, this was just ok. Not terrible. Not overly enjoyable. 

My rating: :star: :star: :star:

Posted in Bookish and Bingeable

Ice Out

Posted on by Vikki Lynn Sorensen

By: Susan Speranza

Francesca Bodin has a near-perfect life as an accomplished music teacher and professional flutist living in the Vermont countryside with her husband Ben, and their four-year old daughter, Addie. This ends suddenly when a snowmobiling accident traps the three of them in a frozen lake. Ben, after escaping onto the ice, leaves her and Addie to die.

Francesca believes she sees their dog pull Addie from the lake and drag her into the nearby woods. Desperate to help her daughter, she crawls from the icy waters and follows them. Once she enters the forest, however, she finds herself trapped in a sinister, dream-like world where night never ends, where Addie’s whereabouts remain hidden from her, and where she encounters a group of women who, like Francesca, have been left to die and now seek to unleash their revenge on those who have harmed them. When they have Ben in their sights, Francesca realizes that if she is ever to escape this nightmare and save her daughter, she must first save the husband who abandoned them. 

If I had to sum up my initial reaction to this book, it would be one phrase – What the…..? And not in a good way!

I must have missed the point of this. Francesca falls through the ice at the beginning of the book. Then it takes most of the book for her to get out of the ice all the while reliving her life in flashbacks. A very normal, ordinary life. This takes so long by the time I got to the end of her part, I was a little muffed to discover that we now had to read Ben’s side of the story. 

Thankfully, Ben’s side doesn’t take as long. 

But then, it goes into this weird fantasy world that makes no sense about this group of women led by a  White Witch who encourages this group of women to some sort of strange afterlife torturing and “killing” of the men who killed them. 

Or something like it. 

Then the story comes into read time where we learn Ben left her on the ice just because he was scared (what a guy!) and the book ends not really on a great note? 

I really didn’t understand the point of this book. What story was being told? I couldn’t really grasp a theme or reason and couldn’t really relate to any of it. 

My rating: :star: