Hello everyone and happy 2020! I know we’re a few weeks into a new year and a new decade but it has been awhile since I posted anything here or you, and even longer since I actually reviewed a book. Life has just gotten away from me. I worked all through the holidays and new year, my parents have continuing medial sagas that I hope will be wrapping up around spring/summer, and I’m moving in less than 3 weeks so all of my free time has been filled with furniture shopping and starting to organize/sort/and pack my stuff. Thankfully, I’m not moving too far, so I’ll be able to make trips back and forth to my old house when I get time to grab extra things I may need, but it’s all still a process that I’m trying to wrap my head around. Once I get settled in my new place (the first week in February), I’ll be able to get back to a more regular posting schedule again.
I can say that I’ve been getting books read at a decent pace (4 already so far this year) but that is only because I get to listen to anything I want on my headphones at work, so for 8-9 hours a day I get to just binge books. I just can’t review them fast enough (clearly).
Anyway, I hope you all had a fantastic holiday season and got lots of books to kick off your TBR pile for the new year. I’m going to go into my vault a little bit and bring you a review from our book club pick a few months back. Let’s talk about A Keeper by Graham Norton!
When Elizabeth Keane returns to Ireland after her mother’s death, she’s focused only on saying goodbye to that dark and dismal part of her life. Her childhood home is packed solid with useless junk, her mother’s presence already fading. But within this mess, she discovers a small stash of letters—and ultimately, the truth.
Forty years earlier, a young woman stumbles from a remote stone house, the night quiet except for the constant wind that encircles her as she hurries deeper into the darkness away from the cliffs and the sea. She has no sense of where she is going, only that she must keep on.
Like most people, I am a big fan of Graham Norton. His talk show on BBC America is so fun, clever, and light-hearted and I really get a kick out of the dynamic he has with his guests. This isn’t the first book he’s authored, but it is the first of his that I read, and I have to say, I’m impressed.
When Elizabeth’s mother, Patricia passes away, Elizabeth has to journey back to her home in Ireland to sort out and settle her affairs. Like most of us, she has a lot going on and is in a weird spot in her life. Her teenage son is visiting his father on the west coast and suddenly seems to be keeping secrets from his mother. Her divorce with her husband was civil, but now he’s living a new, honest life as a gay man, and she’s trying to come to terms with their new relationship.
Once back in Buncarragh, Elizabeth prefers to sneak in and out of town as un-noticed as possible, but fate has other plans in mind. It’s when she discovers some hidden love letters among her mom’s belongings that things change completely.
What begins as a harmless discovery soon turns into a a search for answers, a search for truth, and a search to find out who she really is. I knew going into these pages that I’d be left in suspense, but this story went a way I wasn’t imagining it to go, and I loved that I was kept guessing. What she once thought was a sweet romance between her mother and her father, Edward, actually turned into something far more unpleasant and worrisome.
Elizabeth thought she knew her mother, but a few love letters leads Elizabeth to dig into her past, and what she discovers throws a wrench into everything she grew up knowing about her family and her parents love story.
I thoroughly enjoyed the flashes between past and present as Elizabeth began to solve a mystery, and a young Patricia thought she was experiencing a young love. The story comes together slowly and creates a a burn that you find yourself wanting to alleviate. It’s when the burn begins to grow and the characters unveil who they truly are that you become both hesitant to continue forward and get the answers you’ve been searching for while also needing to turn the page to find out what happens.
If you enjoy a darker story with a bit of mystery to it, I can’t suggest this read enough. Though it’s a work of fiction, there’s an incredible realness and relatability to it that makes you want to know about Patricia’s past and Elizabeth’s roots almost as much as you’d like to know your own. Each character in this story, both major and minor, past and present, have their quirks, flaws, insecurities and more to discover. Even our family, the people we know and care for the most, are not always who they seem, and sometimes we don’t uncover the secrets and the truths until they’re gone. It’s then that we wish we could connect with them and find out every little detail of both the good and bad of the time we had with them.
Honestly, I feel a bit rusty having written this. I think it’s a combination of Sunday exhaustion and getting back into the groove of bogging on the regular. I’ll get there. Thanks for sticking with me, and until next time, happy reading!
