An estranged, dysfunctional family
reunites for a summer wedding on Corfu, a rugged island paradise off the coast
of Greece, in the engagingly insightful novel, The Island Villa, by
prolific British author Sarah Morgan.
Family matriarch Catherine Swift is a wildly
successful romance novelist. Her own life, however, isn’t so
happily-ever-after. Married three times with two daughters conceived from
different husbands, she is tying the knot for a fourth time. Might her nuptials
this time around offer a chance for mother-daughter reconciliation—and for her
two adult children, six years apart, to finally bond?
The girls couldn’t be more different.
Thirty-year-old Adeline, the older daughter--emotionally buttoned up and
self-reliant--is reticent to attend the wedding. She was only eight-years-old
when her parents divorced, and she’s skeptical about her mother’s wedded bliss.
However, after she breaks up with her beau, Adeline jet-sets to Corfu. There,
she’s reunited with her starry-eyed sister and secretly aspiring writer,
Cassie, whose father, Catherine’s second husband, died when Cassie was just
three-years-old. Cassie is excited about the wedding—until secrets revealed
disarm both women. They ultimately find common ground, commiserating about
their mother’s choice for a husband. Will the family finally come together or
will things, once again, fall apart?
Relationships between mothers, daughters and sisters are common to Morgan’s (The Summer Seekers) fiction, and she once again skillfully portrays complex emotional dynamics therein. Readers will be swept up by well-drawn characters, each with her own romantic predicament, and a deft fictional examination of fragile and frayed familial bonds.
The
Island Villa by Sarah Morgan
Canary Street
Press (HarperCollins/Harlequin), $17.99 paperback, 9781335630957, 384 pages
Publishing Date: May 2, 2023
To order
this book on INDIEBOUND/Bookshop.Org, link HERE
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 (May 5, 2023), link HERE