Erica and Beth Calcott inherit their grandmother Meredith’s house, they can keep it providing that they both live there, otherwise it has to be sold the only caveat to them inheriting and missing their mother’s generation who was disowned for not wanting to live there. Meredith was a forceful character, embittered and pointed with the way she dealt with her grandchildren and anyone she came into contact with.
Sisters, very different in manner and personality spend Christmas to initially sort out their grandmother’s legacy but also underneath to see if they want to go back and live in the house where they spent many of their childhood summers before one summer when tragedy struck and their cousin, Henry a nasty spiteful angry boy goes missing never to be found.
Beth has a secret to hide from that time, and Erica believes by being back in the house she will be able to let go of whatever she is punishing herself with which is making her mental state unstable. Back in the house, Beth feels even more unstable especially when a childhood friend, Dinny one of the travellers allowed to use the land brings past misdemeanours back to the fronts of all their minds. However, Erica being the younger sister cannot piece everything together and she starts to question and push both Beth and Dinny until she finds out the truth.
Erica also has another mystery to unravel when a picture of her great-grandmother, Caroline is found holding a baby, dated 1904 before she was married to Lord Calcott. Katherine Webb takes us back to the beginning of the twentieth century and how Caroline ended up having a picture taken with a child that no one seems to know about or where no records are held. This is weaved into the story of the current time, and we get to build up a picture of how Meredith became the woman she became because of the lack of love her mother, Caroline. But why was Caroline like she was? We are taken back to America, to Oklahoma and almost a wild-west setting where Caroline’s past starts in New York and then on a cattle ranch, where the weather is harsh, and the landscape void of anything and where they live alongside American Indians which for Caroline is seen as a social misfortune, her prejudices are apparent immediately and are never dealt with fully. She does not thrive in this place and she is unable to have the one thing she thinks she desires a child; it begins to break her down that she does something unforgivable.
I was surprised by the ‘American’ parts of the story, the descriptions were vivid, and you could almost feel the sand irritating you as it did Caroline, but I felt no sympathy with her at all. She is a well developed character, that is not lacking, but I actually did not feel for her. She annoyed me because she would not accept her situation and then made others pay for it throughout her long life. Her prejudices were never broken down and when she became Mrs Calcott, these move effortlessly to the travellers. Her poisonous mind and lack of love is passed to Meredith her daughter, but why?
Erica back in the present is trying to find out the truth from letters and anecdotes and although she patches together a rather neat ending to it all, this book does not for me have the happy ever after that perhaps you want. That does not make it a bad ending, more it makes you think that actions have ramifications for many people, and that whilst you can help some to move on, their others who are lost and left behind with no reconciliation. To have had a happy ending for all would not have made the book true.
A well written book, and a good debut novel. It did take a while to settle into reading and flitted about a bit at first, but once I was into the style of writing, I read it with ease and was immersed into the story although I had worked a lot of the twists out along the way, but still wanted to see if I was right.
I called the title of my review on Amazon – A Unhappy Tale, because that is what I believed it to be. It did not make me unhappy as I enjoyed the book, which I hope the review shows. It is very difficult to explain this unhappiness.
This book nicely falls into the ‘big house’ category that I do love in books. I have been reading quite a few books lately that fall into that category. In some reviews the comparison to Kate Morton is there, but I actually think that is because they have published the books with similar covers. That way I am sure being the cynic that I am they will draw in fans by purely those means and not by the quality of the writing and plot which I think is good. Though I cannot deny that if someone said to me what other books could I read of a similar ‘ilk’ I would suggest Kate Morton and more recently Lucinda Riley and Linda Gillard.
I know this was a TV Book Club book and won the favourite read, and whilst wandering over on the website I took the quiz about the book, which was meant to test how much you were paying attention to the book. I scored 92% not bad all things considered and I would suggest that these shows anyone that I absorbed the book.
I will definitely pick up her next book, when it comes out in paperback (the smaller paperback version!) as the premise and reviews sound intriguing. I do like books set in modern day with a hark back to the past, my history degree is never far away from me. Although the topic of the ‘wild-west’ in The Legacy was not something I had ever covered but I thought it was very interesting and enjoyed reading about it. I would not be averse now to reading something else set out there now.
The Book Jotter 