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4.0
Summer at Hideaway Key
ByPublisher Description
From the author of The Wishing Tide comes a stunning new novel about two summers, one journal, and the secrets that can break and open our hearts....
Pragmatic, independent Lily St. Claire has never been a beachgoer. But when her late father leaves her a small house on Hideaway Key—one neither her mother nor she knew he owned—she’s determined to visit the sleepy spit of land along Florida’s Gulf Coast. Expecting a quaint cottage, Lily instead finds a bungalow with peeling shutters and mountains of memorabilia. She also catches a glimpse of the architect who lives down the beach….
But it’s the carton of old journals in the front room that she finds most intriguing. The journals were written by her mother’s sister, an infamous beauty whose name has long been banned from the St. Claire home. The journals tell a family tale Lily has never heard, of her mother and her aunt as young girls in Tennessee and the secrets that followed them into adulthood. As she reads, Lily gains a new understanding: about her family and about herself. And she begins to open her heart—to this place, these people, and the man next door. But can she ever truly learn to trust, to believe that love is not a trap but a harbor? And is it true that hearts, even broken ones, can be forged anew?
Pragmatic, independent Lily St. Claire has never been a beachgoer. But when her late father leaves her a small house on Hideaway Key—one neither her mother nor she knew he owned—she’s determined to visit the sleepy spit of land along Florida’s Gulf Coast. Expecting a quaint cottage, Lily instead finds a bungalow with peeling shutters and mountains of memorabilia. She also catches a glimpse of the architect who lives down the beach….
But it’s the carton of old journals in the front room that she finds most intriguing. The journals were written by her mother’s sister, an infamous beauty whose name has long been banned from the St. Claire home. The journals tell a family tale Lily has never heard, of her mother and her aunt as young girls in Tennessee and the secrets that followed them into adulthood. As she reads, Lily gains a new understanding: about her family and about herself. And she begins to open her heart—to this place, these people, and the man next door. But can she ever truly learn to trust, to believe that love is not a trap but a harbor? And is it true that hearts, even broken ones, can be forged anew?
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Meet readers like you in the Fable For You feed, designed to build bookish communitiesSummer at Hideaway Key Reviews
4.0
“I’m not sure what I think about this one. I loved the story, but I feel like one of the characters revealed a fairly major flaw that got ignored for the sake of a happy ending. Still, it was entertaining!”
“Lily St. Claire's father has died, and he's left her a cottage in Florida that she never knew he own. It's a surprise that he owned it because it had long belonged to her aunt, her mother Caroline's sister Lily-Mae, who died a year earlier. Lily's back from Paris, before heading to a new job with a major fashion design house in Italy, but she's got a month before she'll start there. Curious and frustrated by her mother's long-standing hostility and silence about Lily-Mae, and puzzled about why Lily-Mae left the cottage to her father, who then left it to her, Lily heads off for Sand Pearl Cottage in Hideaway Key, Florida.
What she finds there are new friends, and old, disturbing revelations about her mother, her aunt, her father, and even herself.
The book alternates between Lily-Mae's journals from the 1940s, 50s, and 60s, and Lily's story in 1995. Lily-Mae's story is painful, heart-breaking, even, while Lily has her own emotional upheavals to go through, but with more hope for a better outcome.
Hideaway Key is a charming small town with a thriving tourist industry, and I like the people Davis has populated it with. In some respects, though, despite the absence of cell phones and other contemporary technological trappings, it feels like 2015, not 1995. I don't understand why Davis made that particular choice; very few changes would have been needed to Lily-Mae's story to make it work twenty years later. Or the most obvious features that feel like 2015 in 1995 Hideaway Key could have been dropped. It's an unforced error in the story, though it doesn't change the fact that this is an enjoyable story overall.
Overall, this is a great beach read. Recommended.
I received a free electronic galley of this book from the publisher via NetGalley.”
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