Reviewed by Emma Crowley
After her marriage ends, Grace returns to her late grandmother Lily’s seaside cottage in the beautiful village of Dovecote. The path to the house is lined with daisy bushes, and Grace immediately feels like she’s returned home. Surely spending time here will heal her heart?
Clearing out the chest of drawers in her grandmother’s bedroom, Grace discovers romantic letters from the Second World War, each signed ‘Henri’. Lily shared everything with Grace, so why doesn’t she recognise his name? Hidden amongst the letters is a sealed envelope, addressed in Lily’s hand. But what stopped her from sending it?
Desperate for answers, Grace asks the one person she knows can help, her ex-boyfriend and historian, James. His charming smile and kind, brown eyes are a welcome distraction from her grief, and they agree to find out what happened to Henri. As they begin to spend more time together, Grace wonders if years of heartache could be unwritten…
But just as Grace’s feelings for James resurface, they uncover a heartbreaking secret that changes everything. Could these letters be a sign Grace needs to take a second chance on love? Or will Lily’s past force Grace to confront a secret of her own, which could tear her and James apart forever?
Many thanks to Bookouture via NetGalley for my copy of My Grandmother’s Secret to review and to Sharon for having my review on the blog.
My Grandmother’s Secret is the debut book and first in the Dovecote series by Laura Sweeney. It’s a dual timeline book which moves back and forth between 2015 and World War Two. Grace has just buried her grandmother, Lily, and is still reeling from the loss of a woman who meant so very much to her. Her grandfather Richard is living in the Bayview Nursing Home in the coastal village of Dovecote but he is no longer the man he once was as he is suffering from dementia. Lily became Grace’s surrogate mother when her mother Felicity died in a car crash when she was very young and her father upped and left. The anger and resentment at her abandonment by her father still burns deep within Grace and she is determined the same won’t happen to her own son Harry. As well as coping with the loss of her grandmother Grace is still healing from her recent divorce from Ben but she is determined to provide the best life possible for Harry at Seafoam Cottage.
Rachel is Grace’s best friend but she has been acting strange around her lately and the reasons for this are explained fairly early on. I’m not really sure how much this subplot added to the overall story and if it hadn’t been there I wouldn’t have missed it really. I merely mention it as it does affect Grace’s way of thinking and her state of mind as she begins her quest back into the past. I found Grace to be a frustrating character at times. At some points she was very with it and together and would make sensible decisions and I would admire what she was saying. Then at other points I thought god you are being ridiculous and depending on someone else to do the research/investigation and there is so much you need to say to a certain person why on earth are you keeping things bottled up?
When Grace discovers letters in her grandmother’s belongings written to a man named Henri during the war years the cat is truly set amongst the pigeons. Who was this man? He certainly wasn’t her grandfather Richard as he was away in Singapore at the time and did not return until well after the war was over. A further discovery of an unsent letter to Henri inspires Grace to dig back into the past in the hopes of finding out if he is still alive. She wants to deliver the letter. She feels it’s something important that she has to do, that she owes it to her grandmother and that she will feel restless and uneasy until she does so.
This strand of the plot allowed for the introduction of James the former partner of Grace from over 12 years ago. He came across as grumpy and the fact he was helping Grace in her search to locate Henri it was seemed it was benefitting his own research and work at the Imperial War Museum. But dig a little deeper and the reader sees that James is hurting from the events surrounding his break up with Grace and closure has never occurred. Is it time for things to finally come out in the open? Will they both be able to deal with the fallout? Or is the past sometimes better left where it is as sometimes the memories are just too difficult to bring to the surface? Will finding Henri bring more pain rather than the reconciliation and closure that Grace needs to help her in her own personal life?
The further I delved into the book the more I started to realise that Grace and Lily’s stories are very much mirror each other. The similarities really were uncanny. The only difference being things were occurring so many years apart. I won’t go into specific details because it would ruin the plot for people but there were a lot of things that I could see coming a mile off and all my guesses proved to be correct. I wanted there to be more mystery and suspense for things that were revealed earlier on in the book to played a out a bit more before the point of reveal. Things just seemed too obvious and a few red herrings to throw readers off track would have been very welcome.
The chapters that featured Lily and the exploration of her circumstances working as a nurse in Dovecote were enjoyable but too brief. I felt the chapters only scratched the surface of what she was dealing with and the fallout from it. Learning of Henri and his involvement in the war was fascinating and even a chapter or two from his specific viewpoint at the time would have been great. Lily and Grace both battle with big secrets and therefore this begs the question is it ever a good idea to keep important and impactful secrets from people? Well I’ll let you be the judge of that if you decide to read Grace and Lily’s stories.
I do think there could have been more chapters from Lily’s viewpoint. I felt they were a bit scarce and when they did appear they were too brief and I felt I couldn’t get to know Lily in depth. It was as if the chapters were there just to show the similarities in the stories of Grace and Lily. Yes, this book has historical fiction elements and usually the dual timeline works great and I am deeply invested but here I thought the balance wasn’t right with too much focus on Grace in the present. It came across as if the book didn’t know what it wanted to be a modern romance story or historical. I would have preferred the chapters to have been more evenly balanced and that would have added to my enjoyment of the book. Towards the end I thought it was too dragged out with chapters that didn’t need to be there. Usually, I am giving out when a book suddenly ends around the 85% mark as I am expecting more and I find it to be disconcerting but here it went on too long with what I viewed as filler in chapters. Things were stretched out when there was no necessity for this, and I hate saying this but I wanted the book to be over because I wasn’t gaining anything monumental from the last chapters. I felt it had already naturally reached its conclusion.
All that said this is a decent debut from the author and there is great potential for future books if the things I mentioned up above could be rectified. There is a second book in the series all ready to go, My Great-Aunt’s Diary will be published in August and despite my misgivings about book one I will certainly give this new book a read as the blurb looks very promising.
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