Now, onto the real topic of the day;-)
When I received The Lightkeeper’s Daughter by Colleen Coble in the mail, I was pretty excited. I haven’t had the chance to read much by Colleen, and since I love historicals, I was sure this book with the oh-so-lovely cover would pull me in straight away.
The set-up is that Addie was raised as the lighthouse keeper’s daughter in a remote island in California; she rarely got to see any people, except those shipwrecked or visiting the station. All her life, she’s plagued by nightmares where she is the one whose ship was lost, but her father always assured her it wasn’t so.
Only, it was. In the first chapter a gentleman shows up looking for her, claiming she’s his long-lost niece and the heiress to a sizable fortune. Now that her beloved father is dead and she’s left with an ungrateful mother who never cared for her, Addie is only too happy to realize that perhaps she has more family out there. The money she doesn’t give a fig for, but the chance to meet another father? That’s an opportunity she cannot pass up. Her uncle insists she go incognito until they can find proof enough to offer to the family. She doesn’t much care for the deception, but it isn’t all bad. She gets to be governess to her nephew and get to know her new family as the humble girl she is at heart.
Addie is a young woman of such blunt honesty that I can’t help but smile at her, and her naivete is endearing. When she meets and immediately falls for the handsome John, widower of her late half-sister, it’s easy for the reader to love him too. But all is not well in the redwood forests of her new home–someone has gone to great lengths to keep her away from her family all these years, and they’re not about to step aside now and let her into the Eaton’s uppercrust world without a fight.
I have to say that thus far I’m enjoying the book without being so engrossed that I can’t put it down. I began it several weeks ago, but then got sidetracked by the second two Twilight books and writing . . . I picked it up again yesterday and remembered why I’d put it down. While the story’s good and the characters are delightful, things were going so well that I just knew it was all going to fall apart in some horrific way, and I wasn’t in the mood for that, LOL. The unraveling began in the part I was reading last night, and it indeed made me sigh. But I confess I’m fully intrigued by the mystery now and eager to find out who’s out to get our lovely, outspoken heroine.
I have a feeling I’ll be a lot more enthusiastic about this one when I’m more than halfway through–it has a lot of promise, a nice setup for intrigue, and elements that you’ll gobble up if you’re a history fan.
Roseanna M. White is a bestselling, Christy Award winning author who has long claimed that words are the air she breathes. When not writing fiction, she’s homeschooling her two kids, editing, designing book covers, and pretending her house will clean itself. Roseanna is the author of a slew of historical novels that span several continents and thousands of years. Spies and war and mayhem always seem to find their way into her books…to offset her real life, which is blessedly ordinary.