Review - - The Innkeeper's Sister

The Innkeeper’s Sister

By Linda Goodnight

Publisher: Harlequin HQN

Release Date: July 25, 2017

Reviewed by Janga

         

Grayson and Devlin Blake have made a name for themselves as owners of distinctive restaurant. They have returned to Honey Ridge, Tennessee, where they spent childhood summers with their grandparents, to turn a nineteenth-century grist mill into their newest restaurant. While the transformation is taking place, the brothers reserve rooms at the Peach Orchard Inn (The Memory House and The Rain Sparrow). Grayson, a survivor of childhood cancer, is brilliant and driven. His spreadsheets, phone alarms, and clock-conscious life are ways to feel that he is in control. But when a human skeleton is discovered buried in the basement of the mill, he discovers how limited his control is.

Valery Carter was able to use the restoration of the Peach Orchard Inn to lead her sister Julia out of overwhelming grief and depression following the abduction of her young son. Julia is finding happiness again as the wife of Eli Donovan and mother to his son Alex, but Valery is unable to overcome her own secret past. Once a promising dancer, she has given up the art she loved passionately to expiate her guilt, but her demons still torment her.  Her nephew’s abduction exacerbated her guilt and her grief. The choice that is destroying her remains a secret, and she has turned to alcohol for solace. Her drunkenness intensifies her self-hatred. On the surface, Valery appears to be light-hearted and even frivolous. Not even those closest to her realize her suffering.

Grayson had a crush on Valery as a teenager, and his attraction to her is renewed when they meet again. He is wary of his feelings, fearing that Valery could break his heart, but he knows she is troubled and longs to help her. Valery finds Grayson’s combination of intelligence and compassion irresistible. She brings a needed lightness to his life and encourages him to return to the music he has abandoned. But it will take courage on both their parts to reach healing and happiness. They are helped by music composed by Patience Portland more than a century earlier and a mysterious old vagrant who seems attuned to Grayson and Valery’s lives as well as possessing knowledge of horrendous events in the history of the mill.

Goodnight’s third Honey Ridge book blends past and present in another seamless tale that will touch the hearts of her readers. Grayson is a wonderful hero, flawed but honorable and tender and possessing a great capacity for love. Valery is both fragile and strong, and her vulnerability makes her a sympathetic character to a degree that may surprise readers who may have viewed her less tolerantly in the earlier books. They are perfect for each other, different enough to supply needed balance but alike in their love of family, music, and history. I enjoyed seeing Julia, Eli, and Alex living happily as a family and the brief glimpse of Hayden and Carrie, who are preparing for their wedding. The story of Patience Portland and the slave Tandy, whose life, as he acknowledges, parallels that of the biblical Joseph, is also emotionally powerful.

Despite the many strengths of this book, I gave it fewer stars than I awarded the two previous books, both highly recommended in my reviews. Other readers may respond differently, but I found the lack of any resolution to the abduction of Julia’s son a huge disappointment. Goodnight explains her reason, and I respect her authorial autonomy. However, understanding did not mitigate my disappointment. I didn’t expect Nicky to be miraculously restored to his family, but I did expect some resolution.  Julia and Valery’s fear when the skeleton is discovered and their mixed reaction when the bones prove not to be Nicky’s were moving and poignant. But I wanted more closure. If you are a reader who enjoys stories that skillfully weave together the past and present with characters who are real and compelling, I recommend the book. But if you have followed the series, you may find it less than fully satisfying.

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Review - - The Memory House

The Memory House

By Linda Goodnight

Publisher: Harlequin HQN

Release Date: March 31, 2015

Life as Julia Presley knew it disintegrated when her eight-year-old son disappeared. Her marriage could not survive that loss, and Julia was left to claw her way out of a black depression. Now, six year’s after Mikey’s disappearance, Julia is finding new purpose in her work at Peach Orchard Inn, a bed-and-breakfast she and her sister Valery opened in their hometown, Honey Ridge, Tennessee. Julia knows that she will always mourn her son, but the demands of renovating the inn and the satisfaction of welcoming visitors to the B & B have given her a new life. The tasks of cooking and caring for her guests give needed shape to her life, and in restoring the antebellum mansion, Julia has begun the process of restoring herself. Peach Orchard Inn is still a work in progress, and when Eli Donovan offers to work on renovating the carriage house to match Julia’s vision of additional space for her guests at a bargain price plus room and board, Julia hires him.

Eli has come a long way from his privileged childhood. Recently released from prison, he is like a wary, wounded stray that trusts no one. He arrives in Honey Ridge in response to instructions from the great-aunt of a former girlfriend that he needs to collect the son that the now-deceased girlfriend left for him. Eli might be a stranger to six-year-old Alex, but, after careful thought, he determines that he is going to be the best father possible to the boy. When the octogenarian aunt has a stroke, Julia insists Eli bring Alex to Peach Orchard Inn.

Julia and Eli become friends who can count on one another. When Alex joins his father, the three of them, along with Bingo, the blue merle Australian shepherd, create the illusion of a family, but the illusion is shattered when Julia’s ex warns her that she is harboring an ex-con. The revelation makes Julia question if she dare expose herself to further hurt. Eli cannot escape his haunted past, and he wonders if it is fair to impose that on Julia. Just when their questions are resolved and the future is filled with promise, Eli’s past threatens his new life. Julia has doubts and Eli almost despairs. Can a new love survive such a test?

Interwoven with Julia and Eli’s story is the story of Charlotte Reed Portland, the wife of Edgar Portland, the owner of Peach Orchard Farm during the mid-nineteenth century. The Portlands, with their nine-year-old son Benjamin and Edgar’s two younger sisters, live in the house that becomes Peach Orchard Inn during the Civil War. When the house is commandeered as a hospital for the wounded soldiers under the command of Captain William Gadsden, Charlotte finds in the Union officer the warmth and sympathetic understanding that is lacking in her marriage. They fall deeply in love with one another, but because they are both honorable people, Charlotte remains true to her marriage vows. They do write to one another after Will returns to the front lines. It is those letters that Eli finds in the old carriage house more than a century later. The letters, antique clay marbles that randomly appear, and Alex’s conversations with a boy named Ben link the past and the present, the living and the dead.

While supernatural elements are present, they are light and limited. The letters, however, are key to the novel’s themes of healing and redemption. Julia, Eli, and young Alex are all wounded, broken souls who are healed by love and given another chance at happiness. Some readers will know Linda Goodnight through her many novels in Harlequin’s Love Inspired line. Although The Memory House is not an inspirational novel, it is an inspiring book, one that shows characters who have experienced the most grievous losses who find the strength to go on and to open their hearts to love again. Goodnight understands that the deepest grief is not something one “gets over.” These characters remain a woman who lost her son, a child who lost his mother, a man who lost himself, but even marked forever by grief, they find that life and love can be good.

There are two romances in this novel, but the book is as much about self-discovery as about romance. Both romances are heartwarming rather than sensual. If you like romances that focus on the growth of a relationship and show the resilience of the human spirit, I think you will enjoy The Memory House as much as I did. I haven’t been able to discover if Goodnight plans to revisit Honey Ridge. I hope she does. I think there are more stories in that small Southern town, and I would love to read them.

~Janga