Review: Summer at Bluebell Bank

Summer at Bluebell Bank by Jen Mouat
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Three and a half stars

I see this is billed as a charming romance, I must have read a slightly different book to that reviewer!

Kate Vincent is living the dream in New York, a flashy job in advertising, a wealthy boyfriend and evenings filled with dinners with friends. Then an email arrives from her best friend Emily, a best friend she has neither seen or spoken to in years, begging her to come back to Scotland, back to Galloway and the house where they spent so much of their childhood, Bluebell Bank.

Emily Cotton and her large family were the mainstay of Kate’s life, the security and love for a young girl whose mother found comfort in the bottle and her unsuitable boyfriends. Emily and her brothers Dab, Alastair, Noah and Fergus together with their parents Jonathan and Melanie and their grandmother Lena looked after that sad, frightened little girl and nursed her broken heart when her first love, Luke, broke her heart into a million pieces.

When Kate returns to Scotland she finds that things are very different now. Emily is divorced, depressed and has bought a barn which she intends to turn into a book shop, but has yet to do anything more that sit and read books in the cavernous space. Lena has Alzheimer’s and can’t be left unsupervised for long. Noah was expelled from school for crimes as yet unknown, Fergus is in Australia, Ally is in Edinburgh and Dan is married with a baby on the way. Everyone has secrets, explosive damaging secrets to reveal, things that have remained buried for years and they are festering, causing rifts between family and friends. And there is as much anger, betrayal, jealousy and sorrow as love mixed up in Kate’s feelings for the Cottons and their’s for her. The whole family seems to place such high expectations on Kate’s return, as if this woman with abandonment issues is more together than a close-knit family …

Then Luke returns to renovate his father’s old cottage and Kate must look deep into her heart and decide what she truly wants. Is it Ben her boyfriend, is it Dan, her best friend’s brother that she was in love with for most of her childhood, or is it Luke, her first love who broke her heart? But Kate can’t make her decisions until all the secrets have been revealed.

Half of me loved the way that so many of the secrets were teased and hinted at throughout the book, that delicious anticipation of when the truth will be revealed. The other half was exasperated, feeling that there was absolutely no need. I had similar feelings about Kate and Emily and Dan – all three of them at times were so selfish, so centred on their own feelings, their own desires, that they rode roughshod over other people. Frankly I had a hard time liking Kate.

I would most definitely classify this as women’s fiction, the real story is the friendship between Emily and Kate, how the secrets they have kept from each other may break the friendship that they are forging anew. How jealousy can lead to destructive behaviour and burying your head in the sand is never the answer.

I enjoyed this book but I didn’t like it. I didn’t feel it was uplifting, more cathartic.

I received a free copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley in return for an honest review.

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