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Enjoying a romantic candlelit dinner with her fiancé, Ryan, at one of Seattle's chicest restaurants, Kailey Crain can't believe her good fortune: She has a great job as a journalist and is now engaged to a guy who is perfect in nearly every way. As she and Ryan leave the restaurant, Kailey spies a thin, bearded homeless man on the sidewalk. She approaches him to offer up her bag of leftovers and is stunned when their eyes meet, then stricken to her very core: The man is the love of her life, Cade McAllister.
In her 20s, Emily Watson was on top of the world: she had a best-selling novel, a husband plucked from the pages of GQ, and a one-way ticket to happily ever after. Ten years later, the tide has turned on Emily's good fortune. So when her great-Aunt Bee invites her to spend the month of March on Bainbridge Island in Washington State, Emily accepts, longing to be healed by the sea. Researching her next book, Emily discovers a red velvet diary, dated 1943, whose contents reveal startling connections to her own life. The Violets of March announces Sarah Jio as a writer to watch.
In a Seattle houseboat community, the artistic spirit that has flourished since the 1950s may have ended one life, yet saved another. On Seattle's Lake Union floats Boat Street. The farthest slip on the dock holds a houseboat sided with weathered cedar shingles and trailing morning glory, the white flowering vine whose loveliness is deceiving. In the 1950s, Penny, newly Mrs. Dexter Wentworth, takes up residence, dreaming of fulfillment as the muse to a successful local artist destined for national renown.
Twenty-five-year-old scrappy Aubrey is fed up with Tom, a married neurologist with two children. When he's not shoving their relationship on the back burner, he's canceling their dates. With a frightening health diagnosis looming over her shoulder, Aubrey concocts a desperate plan to have Tom forever. Kill the wife. Take her place. Befriending Tom's successful, kind wife comes easily to Aubrey. However, the closer they become, the more doubts Aubrey has about following through. Then, a shocking discovery changes everything....
In the summer of 1942, 21 year-old Anne Calloway, newly engaged, sets off to serve in the Army Nurse Corps on the Pacific island of Bora Bora. More exhilarated by the adventure of a lifetime than she ever was by her predictable fiance, she is drawn to a mysterious soldier named Westry, and their friendship soon blossoms into hues as deep as the hibiscus flowers native to the island.
On the eve of the Second World War, the last surviving specimen of a camellia plant known as the Middlebury Pink lies secreted away on an English country estate. Flora, an amateur American botanist, is contracted by an international ring of flower thieves to infiltrate the household and acquire the coveted bloom. Her search is at once brightened by new love and threatened by her discovery of a series of ghastly crimes. More than half a century later, garden designer Addison takes up residence at the manor, now owned by the family of her husband, Rex. The couple’s shared passion for mysteries is fueled by the enchanting camellia orchard and an old gardener’s notebook. Yet its pages hint at dark acts ingeniously concealed. If the danger that Flora once faced remains very much alive, will Addison share her fate?
Enjoying a romantic candlelit dinner with her fiancé, Ryan, at one of Seattle's chicest restaurants, Kailey Crain can't believe her good fortune: She has a great job as a journalist and is now engaged to a guy who is perfect in nearly every way. As she and Ryan leave the restaurant, Kailey spies a thin, bearded homeless man on the sidewalk. She approaches him to offer up her bag of leftovers and is stunned when their eyes meet, then stricken to her very core: The man is the love of her life, Cade McAllister.
In her 20s, Emily Watson was on top of the world: she had a best-selling novel, a husband plucked from the pages of GQ, and a one-way ticket to happily ever after. Ten years later, the tide has turned on Emily's good fortune. So when her great-Aunt Bee invites her to spend the month of March on Bainbridge Island in Washington State, Emily accepts, longing to be healed by the sea. Researching her next book, Emily discovers a red velvet diary, dated 1943, whose contents reveal startling connections to her own life. The Violets of March announces Sarah Jio as a writer to watch.
In a Seattle houseboat community, the artistic spirit that has flourished since the 1950s may have ended one life, yet saved another. On Seattle's Lake Union floats Boat Street. The farthest slip on the dock holds a houseboat sided with weathered cedar shingles and trailing morning glory, the white flowering vine whose loveliness is deceiving. In the 1950s, Penny, newly Mrs. Dexter Wentworth, takes up residence, dreaming of fulfillment as the muse to a successful local artist destined for national renown.
Twenty-five-year-old scrappy Aubrey is fed up with Tom, a married neurologist with two children. When he's not shoving their relationship on the back burner, he's canceling their dates. With a frightening health diagnosis looming over her shoulder, Aubrey concocts a desperate plan to have Tom forever. Kill the wife. Take her place. Befriending Tom's successful, kind wife comes easily to Aubrey. However, the closer they become, the more doubts Aubrey has about following through. Then, a shocking discovery changes everything....
In the summer of 1942, 21 year-old Anne Calloway, newly engaged, sets off to serve in the Army Nurse Corps on the Pacific island of Bora Bora. More exhilarated by the adventure of a lifetime than she ever was by her predictable fiance, she is drawn to a mysterious soldier named Westry, and their friendship soon blossoms into hues as deep as the hibiscus flowers native to the island.
On the eve of the Second World War, the last surviving specimen of a camellia plant known as the Middlebury Pink lies secreted away on an English country estate. Flora, an amateur American botanist, is contracted by an international ring of flower thieves to infiltrate the household and acquire the coveted bloom. Her search is at once brightened by new love and threatened by her discovery of a series of ghastly crimes. More than half a century later, garden designer Addison takes up residence at the manor, now owned by the family of her husband, Rex. The couple’s shared passion for mysteries is fueled by the enchanting camellia orchard and an old gardener’s notebook. Yet its pages hint at dark acts ingeniously concealed. If the danger that Flora once faced remains very much alive, will Addison share her fate?
Goodnight Moon is an adored childhood classic, but its real origins are lost to history. In Goodnight June, Sarah Jio offers a suspenseful and heartfelt take on how the "great green room" might have come to be. June Andersen is professionally successful, but her personal life is marred by unhappiness. Unexpectedly, she is called to settle her great-aunt Ruby's estate and determine the fate of Bluebird Books, the children's bookstore Ruby founded in the 1940s.
In 1944, 23-year-old Tess DeMello abruptly ends her engagement to the love of her life when she marries a mysterious stranger and moves to Hickory, North Carolina, a small town struggling with racial tension and the hardships imposed by World War II. Tess' new husband, Henry Kraft, is a secretive man who often stays out all night, hides money from his new wife, and shows no interest in making love. Tess quickly realizes she's trapped in a strange and loveless marriage with no way out.
Ainsley O'Leary is so ready to get married - she's even found the engagement ring her boyfriend has stashed away. What she doesn't anticipate is for Eric to blindside her with a tactless breakup he chronicles in a blog - which (of course) goes viral. Devastated and humiliated, Ainsley turns to her half sister, Kate, who's already struggling after the sudden loss of her new husband.
1914. For Paul, with love. Jewish silversmith Johann Blumenthal engraved those words on his most exquisite creation, a singing filigree bird inside a tiny ornamented box. He crafted this treasure for his young son before leaving to fight in a terrible war to honor his beloved country - a country that would soon turn against his own family. A half century later, Londoner Lilian Morrison inherits the box after the death of her parents. Though the silver is tarnished and dented, this much-loved treasure is also a link to an astonishing past.
Memphis, 1939. Twelve-year-old Rill Foss and her four younger siblings live a magical life aboard their family's Mississippi River shantyboat. But when their father must rush their mother to the hospital one stormy night, Rill is left in charge - until strangers arrive in force. Wrenched from all that is familiar and thrown into a Tennessee Children's Home Society orphanage, the Foss children are assured that they will soon be returned to their parents - but they quickly realize the dark truth.
Mia Hamilton lived the perfect life with her husband, university teacher Zach, and their two-year-old daughter. But everything changed when Zach committed suicide on the same night one of his students vanished. Five years later, just when Mia is beginning to heal, stranger Alison walks into her life, saying her husband didn't kill himself. Fragile, slight Alison leads Mia on a path into Zach's past, and Mia begins to think she never really knew her own husband.
Between the urban bustle of Denver and the high-stress environment of a career in neurosurgery, Maggie Sullivan has hit a wall. When an emergency high-risk procedure results in the death of a teenager, Maggie finds herself in the middle of a lawsuit - and experiencing levels of anxiety she's never faced before. She knows she needs to slow down before she burns out completely, and the best place she can think to do that is Sullivan's Crossing.
Amber Bryant and Tyler Hicks have been best friends since they were teenagers - trusting and depending on each other through some of the darkest periods of their young lives. And while Amber has always felt that their relationship is strictly platonic, Tyler has long harbored the secret desire that they might one day become more than friends. Returning home for the summer after her college graduation, Amber begins spending more time with Tyler than she has in years. Despite the fact that Amber is engaged to her college sweetheart, a flirtation begins to grow between them.
You're home making dinner for your husband. You expect him any second. The phone rings - it's the call you hoped you'd never get. You jump in your car and race to a neighborhood you thought you'd never visit. You peer into the dark, deserted building. You brace yourself for the worst. And then, you remember nothing else. They tell your husband you've been in an accident. You lost control of your car as you sped through the worst side of town. The police suspect you were up to no good. But your husband refuses to believe it.
February, 1946. World War Two is over, but the recovery from the most intimate of its horrors has only just begun for Annaliese Lange, a German ballerina desperate to escape her past, and Simone Deveraux, the wronged daughter of a French Résistance spy. Now the two women are joining hundreds of other European war brides aboard the renowned RMS Queen Mary to cross the Atlantic and be reunited with their American husbands.
Celebrity Charles James can't shake the nightmare that wakes him each night. He sees himself walking down a long, broken highway, the sides of which are lit in flames. Where is he going? Why is he walking? What is the wailing he hears around him? By day he wonders why he's so haunted and unhappy when he has all he ever wanted - fame, fans, and fortune and the lavish lifestyle it affords him. Coming from a childhood of poverty and pain, this is what he's dreamed of. But now, at the pinnacle of his career, he's started to wonder if he's wanted the wrong things.
Sixteen-year-old Noa has been cast out in disgrace after becoming pregnant by a Nazi soldier and being forced to give up her baby. She lives above a small rail station, which she cleans in order to earn her keep. When Noa discovers a boxcar containing dozens of Jewish infants bound for a concentration camp, she is reminded of the child that was taken from her. And in a moment that will change the course of her life, she snatches one of the babies and flees into the snowy night.
Seattle, 1933: Vera Ray kisses her three-year-old son, Daniel, good night and reluctantly leaves for work. She hates the night shift, but it’s the only way she can earn enough to keep destitution at bay. In the morning - even though it’s the second of May - a heavy snow is falling. Vera rushes to wake Daniel, but his bed is empty. His teddy bear lies outside in the snow.
Seattle, present day: On the second of May, Seattle Herald reporter Claire Aldridge awakens to another late-season snowstorm. Assigned to cover this "blackberry winter" and its predecessor decades earlier, Claire learns of Daniel’s unsolved abduction and vows to unearth the truth - only to discover that she and Vera are linked in unexpected ways.
The story has a creative and interesting plot surrounding a modern-day love story and a long-ago mystery and the way they become woven together by two freak spring snow storms. It's not great literature, but it would be a good read. I use "read" deliberately because listening to this story is a terrific disappointment.
I realize, as I am nearing the end, that I am so distracted by the narrator, that I find myself wondering, "How would that sound in my head if I were just reading it - would I give that phrase that emphasis? Would I feel differently about this character, this decision, this coincidence if I didn't have that voice in my head making every character sound as if they have a huge stick up their... er ... you know." When the focus of your listening experience becomes the narrator and not the story, something isn't working well.
I'm not sure what Ms. Sands was trying to do with this story, but her slow, deliberate, pronounce-every-syllable pacing becomes very distracting. Her tone is usually "emphatic" sounding and everyone (all her characters) speak with the same level of intensity about everything. Vera is exactly as intense about the hole in her shoe as she is about her missing child - like that.
I listened to samples from some of her other works, and she clearly doesn't narrate like this in all of them, and that leads me to wonder if this might have been the result of bad direction.
3 of 3 people found this review helpful
This book wasn’t for you, but who do you think might enjoy it more?
Perhaps people who like a highly emotionally-charged book, but don't care for literary-style writing. Perhaps someone with children. But, honestly, I wouldn't recommend this book to anyone I know.
What was most disappointing about Sarah Jio’s story?
It was bothersome how everything just seemed to be such a coincidence, but each "twist" and "turn" was really predictable. The characters the protagonist meets are too convenient to helping her in her story. So much so that it became annoying.
When she tried to create a scene that was light-hearted, or funny, (which the protaganist's best friend was supposed to do) it came off as cheesy, clunky, and unnatural.
The cliche critique of the wealthy and entire theme of the book being poor vs. rich also got old. There are plenty of well-written books about the plight of the poor that don't spell it out so obviously and simply, citing each time a person with any money does something terrible, or would do something terrible, and contrasting it with a person with little means doing something wonderful or having a good heart. It's as if the author believes the reader is too stupid to pick up on what she is trying to say.
What didn’t you like about Tara Sands’s performance?
Her voice quavered the entire time, whether the characters were upset or scared, or happy (which, admittedly, was rare). She over-acted, which got pretty irritating. She definitely varied her voices & some might say she did it well, I just didn't care for her voices & theatrics.
7 of 8 people found this review helpful
From the cover design and the book's title, at first glance I thought this might be a romance novel, and had a moment of regret after purchase. However, I was pleasantly surprised, as the story evolves as relatively original and the author weaves the present and past in a very believable and relatable way, with past-to-present story lines that are somewhat similar or at least parallel.
Though romantic love is a theme, it's not the primary one, as the novel deals with larger issues like personal growth, motivation, the definition of true "success", and how we handle life's curve balls; how we play the hand we're given.
I appreciated the main character's perspective from an in-law attached to a high-profile and wealthy family, as many on the outside can think that once you marry into wealth and influence your life is solved. But that's not always the case, and there are downsides.The protagonist struggles to find her own way, establish herself independently of her husband's powerful and prestigious family. She does manage to succeed at this and in the end becomes more than just another appendage to a family with far-reaching power and influence.
I think the plot trajectory is clever, well-conceived and somewhat original. I am sure there are other novels with a similar story but I haven't encountered them, so to me this narrative has legs beyond what at first seems to be simply about a reporter just trying to find a story. And it's all deftly mixed in with the specter of a recent personal tragedy that adds color and depth.
I am only giving this book 4 out of 5, however, because the ending was resolved for me way before the last few chapters, and those sections, seeming like filler, just dragged annoyingly on and on. This part didn't seem to fit - perhaps added as a recommendation from an editor, because the primary reveal was accomplished well in advance of the final chapters.
Still, well worth the purchase and highly deserving of a credit.
20 of 25 people found this review helpful
This is a beautifully written story, very personal . . . which I easily related to . . . if you have had the privilege to have grown up with or known family members who went through the Great Depression, you will appreciate this audio book. My mother-in-law grew up during the depression. She was the most unassuming, gentle, giving person I have ever known. She never went past third grade, because she had to leave her family, her mother, father and seven siblings to go to the city and keep house . . . cook and clean for a wealthy family. And she was never, ever bitter. Family was everything to her. This book tells about a young single mother who has to leave her three year old son in bed asleep at night, while she goes to work cleaning motel rooms. The poverty during the 1930's is absolutely unimaginable to our society today. But I assure you, it was real. This is a complex story of the haves and the have nots . . . of those who abuse their power . . . and those, who by the grace of God, USE their power and money for good. It was then . . . and is now . . . a choice. The story goes back and forth between the '30s and today, and weaves a beautiful tale of love, sadness, mistakes, forgiveness and hope.
2 of 2 people found this review helpful
What did you love best about Blackberry Winter?
I liked the setting back in the 30s and the switching back and forth in time. The characters were interesting--two young women facing the loss of their children.
Would you recommend Blackberry Winter to your friends? Why or why not?
I would recommend with reservations. It is a bit Nicholas Sparks, but not quite as clichéd.
What about Tara Sands’s performance did you like?
She didn't get in the way of the story.
Any additional comments?
The best part of the book occurs in the 30s. The modern day character doesn't read as well.
2 of 2 people found this review helpful
This was as unique a plot as I've seen in a long time, and I liked the shifts from present to past, but the it would have been much stronger without the ungainly coincidences. Good character development and good sense of the lives of the poor in the 1930s. Worth the time.
2 of 2 people found this review helpful
I am having a run of bad luck with books!
YET AGAIN a somewhat promising idea turns out to be a sappy, badly written book. UGH. It was so flat and not realistic at all; people don’t speak that way in real life! Not people you’d want to spend time with anyway… it struck me as what a child’s idea is of how grown-ups talk.
I kept reading because I am stubborn about finishing books, and I always hope that despite the eye-rolling, predictable, cliché and banal dialogue – there might be a redeeming story buried down deep in there somewhere!! But it was a lot of sappy drama to slog through – barely worth it.
I concede that perhaps it was the narrator that ruined it for me. Her overly-dramatic over-acted performance was just too much.
At the risk of sounding obnoxious, I would qualify this book as a “Beach Read”. Lower your standards. Think: light & fluffy and you might not be as disappointed.
3 of 4 people found this review helpful
Would you say that listening to this book was time well-spent? Why or why not?
I don't think this particular audiobook was time well spent - although I connected with the characters and was mildly interesting in the dual plot (one happening in the 30s, one present day), I found the plot dragged and the writing was cliched and a little sappy. Although the title speaks of Winter, my feeling is this a pleasant beach read at best....if you have the patience.
3 of 4 people found this review helpful
What made the experience of listening to Blackberry Winter the most enjoyable?
I did not want it to end. Great way to bring a story together. Applauds
Who was the most memorable character of Blackberry Winter and why?
Verra
1 of 1 people found this review helpful
The over-enunciating, over emphatic narrator practically ruined this story for me. Add that to the rather predictable, formula-driven plot and this became an average if not less than average read at best. Still, there was something captivating about the plot. . . pitting poor against wealthy and overcoming the ravages of time to open old memories and uncover new evidence. So I'll give it a weak, wavering one-thumbs-up.
4 of 6 people found this review helpful