Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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5.0 out of 5 stars
An engrossing story , 27 Jan 2009
An engrossing story of how the relationship and love between parents can affect their children and the dynamics of family life into the children's adult years.
Hugh Renwick is a renound artist and larger than life figure; hard drinking, womanising, partying lifestyle. However, he loves his wife and three daughters. Yet the actions he takes affect his daughters, Caroline, Clea and Skye, into their thirties.
His wife, Augusta, loves her daughters, but is madly in love with her flamboyant husband and wishes to keep him and their flamboyant lifestyle, at all costs, despite an affair he has. Her way of dealing with that and other problems is denial.
The book starts with a prologue which sets the scene for a tradegy which happened when Carolyn was 5, Clea 3 and Skye yet to be born. This tradegy colours their lives from that moment on and Hugh's method of dealing with it leads to further tradegy later in their lives.
Chapter 1 then starts when Caroline is 36 years of age. Clea is happily married to a vicar and has 2 children. Skye, an artist, is married to an unstable artist who likes to think that he emulates her father. He has currently left her for another woman and Skye drinks heavily to forget both that and something that happened when she was 17, which has affected the rest of her life. Caroline is not married. She is the sophisticated owner of a local artists inn and determined never to marry.
Hugh died of cancer several years ago and Augusta still lives at Firefly Hill, the family home, revering her husband's memory. Skye now lives with her.
Caroline is the "go too" girl of the family. The family's mainstay and "rock". The one who was always there for her sisters and for her mother. She is more the family mother than her mother. Even married Clea, always turns to Caroline to solve everything. The sisters are very close and love their mother, but have somewhat ambivalent feeling towards their flamboyant father, despite loving and missing him.
Joe Connor was six when his father died and he became penpals with the 5 year old Caroline, until finally, as a teenager, he learnt what really happened the night his father died and never wrote to Caroline again. Now aged 38, he is an oceanographer and treasure hunter with his own treasure hunting business diving wrecks. He arrives at Black Hall to dive the wreck of an 18th century ship that Carolyn told him about when they were children.
As the summer gets under way, the past is brought back to life for them all and they are forced to face the realities, especially Augusta.
Caroline and Joe still feel a strong connection, but he still holds deep resentments. Does he hold the key to her family's healing, or its final destruction?
A very enjoyable story of a family in a crisis due to actions taken by others in the past. Who find the courage in each other to face the past and the present and carry on.
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