The Sound of Glass

The Sound of Glass by Karen White.

Paperback: 448 pages
Publisher: NAL;(April 5, 2016)
ISBN-10: 0451470907





Two years after the death of her husband, Merritt Heyward receives unexpected news—Cal’s family home in Beaufort, South Carolina, bequeathed by his reclusive grandmother, now belongs to Merritt.
In Beaufort, the secrets of Cal’s unspoken-of past reside among the pluff mud and jasmine of the ancestral Heyward home on the Bluff. This unknown legacy, now Merritt’s, will change and define her as she navigates her new life—a life complicated by the arrival of her too young stepmother and ten-year-old  half brother.
Soon, in this house of strangers, Merritt is forced into unraveling the Heyward family past as she faces her own fears and finds the healing she needs in the salt air of the Low country.

I have read several books by Karen White and enjoyed them all.  She has written many more but at times when I read reviews they just aren't for me, but, the ones I have chosen have been very good and I even have one on my wish list yet!

This is a very touching story of a woman beginning her life over again after the death of her husband.  She inherits her mother-in-laws old home in South Carolina and decides to start life again there, and moves from Maine to South Carolina.

Many interesting life stores rolled into one in this book, along with a love story.  There is more then one kind of love and there are more then one type in this book.  Typically I am not a love story reader but some have the knack to pull me in and this is one of them.

I enjoyed the book and hope one day to get another book of hers to read. 

The Uninvited

The Uninvited by Cat Winters.

Paperback: 368 pages
Publisher: William Morrow Paperbacks (August 11, 2015)
ISBN-10: 0062347330

 



 

Amazon Review:

Twenty-five year old Ivy Rowan rises from her bed after being struck by the flu, only to discover the world has been torn apart in just a few short days.

But Ivy’s life-long gift—or curse—remains.  For she sees the uninvited ones—ghosts of loved ones who appear to her, unasked, unwelcomed, for they always herald impending death. On that October evening in 1918 she sees the spirit of her grandmother, rocking in her mother’s chair. An hour later, she learns her younger brother and father have killed a young German out of retaliation for the death of Ivy’s older brother Billy in the Great War.

Horrified, she leaves home, to discover the flu has caused utter panic and the rules governing society have broken down. Ivy is drawn into this new world of jazz, passion, and freedom, where people live for the day, because they could be stricken by nightfall. But as her ‘uninvited guests’ begin to appear to her more often, she knows her life will be torn apart once more, but Ivy has no inkling of the other-worldly revelations about to unfold.

The Uninvited is an atmospheric, haunting, and utterly compelling novel.



Ok, so.... this had a very unexpected ending!  This is a good thing ! I am not the brightest bulb in the pack but I truly didn't pick up on any hints that the ending would be as it was!

Once again a book I read is set in wartime. Even "American Germans" are shunned against.  There is so much hatred around, it was not a nice time to live.  I feel as if Cat Winters has her own strong feeling written in this book as well as her fictional story...

In it she writes as the German young man:

Since my immigration, I have learned that Americans have belittled, beaten and killed their black and native citizens for centuries.  The recent number of abused and murdered Germans and other foreign-born residents seems relatively small in comparison to the crimes against the nonwhites of this country.  Yet this added surge of hatred only proves that America has no right sailing to foreign lands in the name of protecting freedom-not when we're  steeped in the mire of violent inequality here at home.

I will leave it at that... and, just ask:  do you believe in ghosts?