Tag: dual time

#BlogTour #BookReview The House at Helygen by Victoria Hawthorne

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The House at Helygen Blog Tour PosterWelcome to the final day of the blog tour for The House at Helygen by Victoria Hawthorne. My thanks to Katya at Quercus for inviting me to take part and for my review copy. You can read my thoughts on the book, which was published on 18th August, below.

The House at HelygenAbout the Book

2019. When Henry Fox is found dead in his ancestral home in Cornwall, the police rule it a suicide, but his pregnant wife, Josie, believes it was murder. Desperate to make sense of Henry’s death she embarks on a quest to learn the truth, all under the watchful eyes of Henry’s overbearing mother. Josie soon finds herself wrestling against the dark history of Helygen House and ghosts from the past that refuse to stay buried.

1881. New bride Eliza arrives at Helygen House with high hopes for her marriage. Yet when she meets her new mother-in-law, an icy and forbidding woman, her dreams of a new life are dashed. And when Eliza starts to hear voices in the walls of the house, she begins to fear for her sanity and her life.

Can Josie piece together the past to make sense of her present, or will the secrets of Helygen House and its inhabitants forever remain a mystery?

Format: Paperback (368 pages)        Publisher: Quercus
Publication date: 18th August 2022 Genre: Historical Fiction, Dual Time

Find The House at Helygen on Goodreads

Purchase links
Hive | Amazon UK
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My Review

Moving between past and present, The House at Helygen starts off mysterious, progresses to sinister and concludes as full-on melodrama.  If you’re looking for a book with the vibes of Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca or Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, you’re in the right place. The present day Helygen House even has a west wing previously destroyed by fire. And if you were looking for a modern day equivalent of Rebecca‘s Mrs Danvers then look no further than Josie’s mother-in-law, Alice, who in her habits and attitudes seems a woman ‘from another time entirely… who doesn’t live in the modern world at all’, closely followed by Eliza’s mother-in-law, Harriet, in the 19th century story.

Told from the point of view of two women, separated by over a century but who share many of the same experiences, plus the voice of a third woman through means of a journal, that narrative device beloved of historical novelists, The House at Helygen contains everything you might want from a historical suspense novel.

The author creates a brooding sense of menace which gradually builds as the house reveals it secrets and the dark past of the families who have occupied it. A silhouette glimpsed in a doorway, an unexplained cry in the night, a shadowy figure under a willow tree (very The Turn of the Screw), something scratching against a window ‘like fingers clawing to get in’.  And then there’s the disquieting atmosphere of some of the unused rooms of Helygen House where past and present seem separated by a mere whisper. Josie’s friend, Flick, sums it up well. ‘It just feels weird in here. Like something isn’t quite right. Like the air has been disturbed, and we’re trespassing. Like we shouldn’t be in here at all.’

The House at Helygen is a skilfully crafted story of obsession, secrets and what might be a grim inheritance.

In three words: Atmospheric, suspenseful, intricate

Try something similar: A Woman Made of Snow by Elisabeth Gifford

Victoria HawthorneAbout the Author

Vikki Patis is the bestselling author of psychological thrillers In the Dark (2021), The Wake (2020), Girl, Lost (2020), The Girl Across the Street (2019), and The Diary (2018). Girl, Lost, a top 100 bestseller on Amazon, was later longlisted for the Not the Booker Prize 2020. Her latest thriller, Return to Blackwater House, was published in March 2022 by Hodder & Stoughton.

She is represented by Emily Glenister at DHH Literary Agency and also writes historical fiction as Victoria Hawthorne. Her first historical suspense novel, The House at Helygen, was published in April 2022 by Quercus, with another to follow in 2023.

Vikki has also written articles for numerous publications. After being diagnosed with Perthes disease as a child, fibromyalgia in 2016 and coeliac disease in 2018, she tries to raise awareness of living with a chronic illness through her writing, and includes a diverse range of characters in her fiction. She lives in Scotland with her wife, two wild golden retrievers, and an even wilder cat.

Connect with Victoria
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#BlogTour #BookReview The Shimmer on the Water by Marina McCarron

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The Shimmer on the Water Blog Tour BannerWelcome to today’s stop on the blog tour for The Shimmer on the Water by Marina McCarron which was published as an ebook on 4th August and will be available in paperback later this year. My thanks to Amy at Head of Zeus for inviting me to take part in the tour and for my digital review copy via NetGalley.  Do check out the post by my tour buddy for today Wendy at Wendy Reads Books.

The Shimmer on the Water Author Square shareable 3About the Book

Three women. Two generations apart. One secret they share.

Maine, 1997. As the people of Fort Meadow Beach celebrate the Fourth of July, four-year-old Daisy Wright disappears and is never seen again.

Maine, 2022. Fired from her job and heart-broken, Peyton Winchester moves back home for the summer. Bored and aimless, she finds a renewed sense of purpose when an ad for a journalism course reminds her of a path not taken. Returning to life in her home town brings back all kind of memories – including Daisy’s disappearance when she was a young girl herself.

As Peyton begins to search for answers about Daisy’s disappearance, she finds that they might be closer to home than she thinks – and their lives become intertwined with irreversible consequences.

Format: ebook (413 pages)             Publisher: Aria
Publication date: 4th August 2022 Genre: Contemporary Fiction

Find The Shimmer on the Water on Goodreads

Purchase links
Amazon UK
Link provided for convenience only, not as part of an affiliate programme

My Review

The Shimmer on the Water alternates between two storylines, one in the present day and one starting in 1966.

The book is not so much about solving the mystery of Daisy Wright’s disappearance, although it does provide a number of connections between the two storylines, as about family secrets and the impact they have when they are finally revealed.  For Peyton, trying to discover the person responsible for Daisy’s disappearance allows her to focus on something other than recent events in her life. ‘Getting dumped. Getting fired. Losing friends. The embarrassment of all her failures.’ Having to return to her parents’ home feels like the final humilation. Peyton feels there is a story to be told about Daisy’s disappearance, one which might help in her ambition to become a journalist.  It’s not a plan that finds much favour with Peyton’s mother whose attitude to her daughter is one of disappointment and often cool indifference.

A separate storyline follows the early life of Euella and her younger sister, Minnie, in 1960s Tennessee. It’s a powerful and moving story which was the standout element of the book for me. Euella’s father and brother are both drunks prone to violent outbursts as a result of which her mother has become absent emotionally, and later literally absent. It is left to Euella to care for and protect her young sister. It’s a struggle to put food on the table and to keep them warm through the harsh winters. The family’s poverty and increasingly dysfunctional nature mean they are ostracised by the local community. Fuelled by anger and an innate fortitude, Euella is determined to make a better life for herself and her sister. ‘A plan is forming. New ideas are coming. She can feel herself changing, becoming something different. Someone different.’

The connections between the two storylines become apparent fairly early on but this doesn’t stop Eualla’s story continuing to be utterly compelling as we see her literally reinvent herself. That’s not to say she doesn’t make mistakes along the way, quite costly ones as it turns out that will have repercussions in the future. Gradually Peyton discovers more about her family, and in particular her mother. It will result in her seeing things in a completely new light and bring about a fundamental change in her relationship with her mother. It also triggers memories of events on the day Daisy Wright went missing. But after so many years can those memories be relied upon?

And the ‘shimmer on the water’ of the title? This early description of what Peyton observes as she gazes out to sea made me think it is the prospect of calm returning after a period of turmoil. ‘The sound of a boat grows louder and she turns to watch as it speeds by, the frothy white wake it leaves disturbing the shimmer on the water before it is absorbed again into the waves and the water is once again flat.’

If The Shimmer on the Water is less of a mystery novel than the book description might suggest, it is still a skilfully crafted dual time novel that explores the impact of fractured family relationships.

In three words: Moving, insightful, intriguing

Try something similar: Only May by Carol Lovekin

Marina Image by Julia HawkinsAbout the Author

Marina McCarron was born in eastern Canada and studied in Ottawa and Vancouver before moving to England. She holds a Bachelor of Arts and a Master of Publishing degree. She has worked as a reporter, a freelance writer, a columnist and a manuscript evaluator. She loves reading and travelling and has been to six of the seven continents. She gets her ideas for stories from strolling through new places and daydreaming. Her debut novel, The Time Between Us, came to her as she stood at Pointe du Hoc on a windy June day and asked the magical question, what if…?

Connect with Marina
Website | Twitter