Thursday, August 18, 2011

Pam's Review: Love Always by Harriet Evans








Love Always~Harriet Evans 



  • Paperback: 480 pages



  • Publisher: Gallery



  • Publish Date: June 21, 2011



  • ISBN-10: 1451639627



  • ISBN-13: 978-1451639629



  • ASIN: B004G8QTMU




From the author's website:

"This family's poisoned.  They won't tell you, but they are."


From a hot, tense Cornwall summer in 1963 to present day London, LOVE ALWAYS is the story of one girl's life fallling apart and what she finds out along the way as she tries to put it back together again.  Things have gone badly wrong for Natasha Kapoor, somewhere - she should be a successful jeweller in East London and everything should be perfect, but it's not.  And when her grandmother dies and she travels back to Summercove, the family home by the Cornish sea,  she is given an old, scribbled page by her grandfather.  It's the fragment of the diary of her Aunt Cecily, who died in a tragic accident many years ago, leaving behind a broken family and a terrible secret.  What happened that summer in 1963 and is Natasha's family irrevocably poisoned by it?  Will Natasha ever be able to make a fresh start and find love for herself and if so, how? 

Natasha’s world is falling apart around her. Her jewelry business is having some serious financial problems, her marriage is on the rocks, and her grandmother, who she used to spend many summers with, just passed away. She travels to meet her family at Summercove, her grandparent’s house where she used to go for the summer, for the funeral. At the gathering afterwards Cecily’s name gets brought up briefly a few times. The family doesn’t talk about Cecily, Natasha’s aunt who died at Summercove when she was only fifteen. However, in private, Natasha’s grandfather gives her Cecily’s diary. This diary is Natasha’s chance to get to know what happened that summer, find out why her family holds so much animosity towards her mother, Cecily’s sister, and figure out once and for all why no one wants to talk about the past.





My thoughts:


After reading this book I feel like I know the characters. My heart aches for Natasha; everything starts off going wrong for this woman. It also seems like she has no one stable in her life, no one she can really rely on or confide in. Her husband, Oli, is a jerk, and I found myself egging Natasha on towards some sort of face slapping or drink throwing towards him. He made my blood boil. Her mother, Miranda, is a selfish woman. She won’t tell Natasha who her father is, and leaves for days at a time, not telling her where she is going.



Not everything stays so depressing however. With reading Cecily’s diary and finding out about the past, Natasha also grows and picks up and puts back together the pieces of her life. Her issues with her career, her marriage, her family; everything gets taken care of, one way or another. This story showed me that life’s not always perfect, and people are not always what they seem to be, sometimes for the better, and sometimes for the worse.




This book was a little dark for me, but it was a great story. I feel like these characters are going to stay with me for a while. I will definitely read another book by Ms. Harriet Evans.







My Rating:






Pam




Book provided by the publisher in exchange for an honest review.

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