Tag: historical fiction

Blog Tour/Book Review: I Will Find You (Seal Island #2) by Daniela Sacerdoti

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I Will Find You Blog Tour Poster

Having read and enjoyed the first book in Daniela Sacerdoti’s Seal Island series, Keep Me Safe, I’m delighted to be hosting the final stop on the blog tour for the next book in the series, I Will Find You.

I Will Find YouAbout the Book

After her beloved mother dies, Cora is heartbroken. When she discovers her mother has left her a cottage – a crumbling shelter on a remote and beautiful Scottish island – Cora hopes that travelling there will help her feel closer to the person she has lost. The moment she arrives on the wild, windswept island of Seal, Cora instantly falls under its spell. She is drawn to Innes, recently returned to the island to confront his past.

As Cora begins to unravel her mother’s connection to Seal, she learns the island has a dark, turbulent history. She is not the first lonely traveller to have sought refuge at Gealach Cottage. And there may be far more to her attraction to Innes than she could have ever imagined…

Format:  ebook (320 pp.)        Publisher: Headline Review
Published: 17th May 2018      Genre: Contemporary/Historical Fiction, Romance

Purchase Links*
Amazon.co.uk  ǀ  Amazon.com ǀ Hive.co.uk (supporting UK bookshops)
*links provided for convenience, not as part of any affiliate programme

Find I Will Find You on Goodreads

My Review

Following the death of her mother, Cora and her brother, Stephen, find out they didn’t know everything about her.  Far from it.  A box containing a key leads them to discover their mother owned a cottage on the remote Scottish island of Seal.  For Cora, handling the key evokes a strange sense of yearning, a feeling a little like déjà vu.    Already, with her mother’s death, she feels a sense of displacement from her current life – like ‘a stranger in a strange land’.  No longer do the busy streets of London fill her with excitement: ‘I’d begin to feel overwhelmed by the noise and the smells if the city.’ Something has changed for Cora.  ‘My mum’s death had been like that – a tiny event in the big picture of things, no more than a minute shift of the axis, and yet it had brought a monumental change in my life, a change to everything I was, everything I loved, everything I’d built up to then….I existed in a world that had changed all its rules.’

The cottage offers Cora the prospect of a new start, a way to leave behind her grief at her mother’s death, a failed relationship, her current struggle to make progress with the book she has been working on and a feeling that maybe her heart is ‘asleep’.  (Don’t worry, it won’t be long before it is awoken.)  Those familiar with Daniela Sacerdoti’s books won’t be surprised to learn that, along with the romantic storyline, there is an underlying sense of the mystical or supernatural, a strong element of folklore and an atmospheric sense of place.   The location, on a remote Scottish island, at the mercy of the wind and weather, is the perfect place for these different strands to come together.

There is also a strong sense of the past and present intertwining as the present day story of Cora is interspersed with a complementary story from 1745 recounting the experiences of Margaret McCrimmon, caught up in the climax of the Jacobite risings.  The narrative moves seamlessly between the two stories with the two women’s lives following a similar trajectory that involves love and hope for the future, but not before very real dangers have been navigated.

I’ll confess that I sometimes struggle with books that have dual time narratives, often finding the story set in the past more compelling than that set in the present.  I’m pleased to say I Will Find You was an exception.  I think this is because the main characters in the present day storyline, Cora and Innes, felt absolutely believable as characters.  In particular, Innes, for whom the author creates a complex and traumatic back story.  His memories of deeply unsettling events from his childhood help to explain his restless spirit, his history of failed relationships and his feeling that he is in some way ‘tainted’, doomed to spoil everything – and everyone – he touches.

The book is structured with a Prologue and Epilogue framing three sections appropriately titled, because of the pivotal role the sea plays in the book, ‘Low Tide’, ‘Flood Tide’ and ‘High Tide’.  For those who don’t know (and I had to look it up), a flood tide is the incoming or rising tide that occurs between the time when the tide is lowest and the time when the following tide is highest.

For those who have read the first book in the series (although this isn’t essential, as I Will Find You works perfectly well as a standalone), there are walk on parts for a couple of the characters from Keep Me Safe.   Finally, I need to mention the final section of the book, entitled ‘Book of Souls’, which addresses another theme common to the author’s books, that of the past repeating itself – or perhaps, echoing is a more apt word – down the years.

If you’re a reader looking for a compelling, emotional story with an atmospheric setting and who has a few tissues handy for the end, then there’s good news – I Will Find You has found you!

I received an advance review copy courtesy of publishers, Headline, and NetGalley in return for an honest and unbiased review.

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In three words: Romantic, atmospheric, haunting

Try something similar…Secrets of the Sea House by Elisabeth Gifford or watch the classic film I Know Where I’m Going (1945).

About the Author

Daniela Sacerdoti is a mother and a writer. Born in Naples, but brought up in a small village in the Italian Alps, she lives near Glasgow with her husband and sons. She steals time to write when everyone has gone to bed, or before they wake up. She’s a Primary teacher, but she chose to be at home with her children. She loves being with her boys, reading anything she can get her hands on and chatting with her girlfriends. But she also adores being on her own, free to daydream and make up stories.

Daniela Sacerdoti
Photo credit: Josephine Tunney

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Guest Post: The Magpie Tree by Katherine Stansfield

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I’m delighted to welcome author Katherine Stansfield to What Cathy Read Next Today.   I recently read and enjoyed Katherine’s latest book, The Magpie Tree, the second in her Cornish Mysteries series.  Therefore, the subject of Katherine’s guest post, ‘Sequels: looking back or looking forward?’ is particularly relevant for me as a reader coming in at book two in the series.  You’ll be able to find out what I thought of The Magpie Tree when I publish my review in the next few days.  What I will say is that it made me immediately add the first book in the series, Falling Creatures, to my wish list!

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Praise for Falling Creatures:

‘Beautifully realised…Stansfield manages to create a dark and macabre atmosphere that feels fresh and original’ (The Times, Historical Fiction Book of the Month)

‘An enticing adventure of a novel, rich in beautifully realised period detail’ (Kate Hamer, author of The Girl in the Red Coat)

‘Full of dark wisdom and mystery.  A thoroughly good read’ (Paula Brackston, author of The Witch’s Daughter)

The Magpie Tree CoverAbout the Book

Jamaica Inn, 1844: the talk is of witches. A boy has vanished in the woods of Trethevy on the North Cornish coast, and a reward is offered for his return.

Shilly has had enough of such dark doings, but her new companion, the woman who calls herself Anna Drake, insists they investigate. Anna wants to open a detective agency, and the reward would fund it. They soon learn of a mysterious pair of strangers who have likely taken the boy, and of Saint Nectan who, legend has it, kept safe the people of the woods. As Shilly and Anna seek the missing child, the case takes another turn – murder.

Something is stirring in the woods and old sins have come home to roost.

Format: Hardcover, ebook (320 pp.)    Publisher: Allison & Busby
Published: 22nd March 2018                  Genre: Historical Fiction, Historical Mystery

Purchase Links*
Publisher | Amazon.co.uk  ǀ  Amazon.com  ǀ Hive.co.uk (supporting UK bookshops)
*links provided for convenience, not as part of any affiliate programme

Find The Magpie Tree on Goodreads

Guest Post: ‘Sequels: looking back or looking forward?’ by Katherine Stansfield, author of The Magpie Tree

When my publisher, Allison & Busby, signed me with a two book deal I was over the moon. I’d been working on my 1840s crime novel Falling Creatures for nearly five years by that time and had got to know my detective duo, Shilly and Anna Drake, very well. They’re an unlikely pairing, as all good detective partnerships are. Shilly is an illiterate farm servant who hails from rural Bodmin Moor in Cornwall. Her world view might be narrow but her imagination is a wide expanse, open to the supernatural elements that stalk the moors. Anna is the rational to Shilly’s mysticism – a native of London, she is drawn to Cornwall to investigate the infamous murder of Charlotte Dymond, Shilly’s lover. By the time the novel ends (and after I’d worked through umpteen major re-writes), Anna and Shilly have got the measure of each other. Being able to give them another outing in a sequel was a gift. They were ready to go: notebooks primed, satchel packed. But the task was much harder than I’d anticipated when I signed on the dotted line for Book Two.

I’d never written a sequel before and a question that presented itself very early on in writing The Magpie Tree, second in the Cornish Mysteries series, was, ‘How often should the characters look back?’ As I tried to establish the opening of the sequel I found that the ground it was built on was unstable: my protagonist Shilly kept referring to things that had happened in the previous instalment. As she entered a new room she thought of one she’d left behind. When she ate something different for breakfast she compared it to the food she’d been used to in her previous life. These glances back made it hard to get the action moving. My character was stuck in thought mode: passive in her new surroundings when she needed to be active. A big problem was, I was happy to let her look back, worried that readers who had experienced a break between the two books might want a reminder as to how the characters had ended up together in Jamaica Inn, where The Magpie Tree begins. And for those new to the series, nothing happens in a vacuum so some context was definitely needed, but how much? Surely the needs of these two groups of readers – those familiar with the first book and those starting the series with the second – have different needs? Could there be a compromise between them?

I agonised over this for some time, and the new scenes kept circling, and then I realised: it wasn’t my protagonist who needed to look back.

It was me.

I’d worked on Falling Creatures for so long, got to know the scenes and their settings so well, breathed the moor’s peaty air, heard the cows lowing to be milked on Shilly’s farm, that the first book was functioning like a security blanket. I needed to let go of the first book to let the new book stand on its own feet. Yes, the sequel started at the point the first book ended, and yes, the same detectives tackled the new case, but The Magpie Tree couldn’t rely on its predecessor. It wasn’t just a sequel to a story. It was a story itself.

But letting go of a security blanket is hard. Drastic action was needed. Shilly’s partner Anna had to take charge.

I realised that Shilly’s looking back centred on the woman she’d lost: her murdered lover, Charlotte. When Shilly left the moor to go and work with Anna at the end of Falling Creatures, she was wearing one of Charlotte’s old dresses. In one of the early scenes of The Magpie Tree I gave Anna the agency to put an end to Shilly’s longing with a symbolic gesture: Anna cuts up Charlotte’s dress and burns the scraps. Shilly cries but she knows that Anna is right, just as I did.

We all had to move on. There was a new case waiting to be solved.

© Katherine Stansfield, 2018

The Magpie Tree

Katherine StansfieldAbout the Author

Katherine Stansfield is a novelist and poet whose debut novel, The Visitor, won the Holyer an Gof Fiction Award.  She grew up in the wilds of Bodmin Moor in Cornwall and lived on the west coast of Wales for many years.

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