Two grief-stricken
women cross paths and help each other come to grips with the mysteries of their
respective lives.
Societal stigmas and taboos reside at the heart of Love,
Alice by Barbara Davis (Summer
at Hideaway Key). Set in Charleston, S.C., the novel focuses on
36-year-old Dovie Larkin, whose fiancé committed suicide two weeks before their
wedding. A year later, Dovie spends her lunch hours sitting graveside at the
cemetery, still grappling with what happened and why, unable to pick up the
pieces of her life.
One day, Dovie
spots an elderly woman leaving a note at the striking angel grave marker of
Alice Tandy, a young maid who died 32 years earlier and, to the bewilderment of
locals, had been buried in a plot belonging to one of the richest families in
town. After the woman leaves, Dovie reads the note: a mother's impassioned
regret for having sent her young daughter to an asylum for unwed mothers in
Cornwall, England, in the 1960s. Dovie, identifying with the unresolved grief
expressed, soon discovers a trove of related letters in the cemetery's lost and
found, and sets off in search of the writer, Dora Tandy, who has come to
Charleston to learn more about the life--and death--of her long-lost daughter,
Alice.
Hope, love and
forgiveness permeate this beautifully rendered novel where both Dovie and Dora
unearth answers to mysteries and reveal secrets that will come to define their
respective lives and quests for peace.
Berkley, $16.00 Paper,
9780451474810, 432 pages
Publication
Date: December 6, 2016
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NOTE: This
review is a reprint and is being posted with the permission of Shelf Awareness. To read
this review on Shelf Awareness:
Reader's Edition (January 3,
2017), link HERE