The House at Mermaid's Cove

Phrynne

Rating: really liked it
I enjoyed this book mostly for its beautiful setting in Cornwall which is one of my favourite places in the world! The author obviously knows the area well.

I would describe The House at Mermaid's Cove as historical romance because a lot of time was spent on Alice's emotional ramblings about whether Jack was interested in her or not. I wanted to grab her by the shoulders and say "Of course he is interested in you - it couldn't be more obvious." But that's just me.

The rest of the book was a good story about the French Resistance in WW2. I could have wished for a bit more depth but it was interesting. Basically this was a light, enjoyable read.

Thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for the opportunity to read and review this bok.

Brenda

Rating: really liked it
It was 1943 when Alice washed ashore, more dead than alive, on a small beach in Cornwall, a beach she came to love which was named Mermaid’s Cove. Alice had been on a ship bound for Ireland from Africa when it was torpedoed by the Germans. Jack Trewella was the man who rescued her, carrying her to a small boathouse nearby. As Alice’s wounds healed, she came to look forward to Jack’s visits and that of his dog. She learned more about where she was, what was happening and what she could do to help.

The Land Girls were helping at Jack’s farm, milking the cows, making butter and once Alice was well, she joined them. But it wasn’t long before Jack had different work for her. The past which she’d told Jack about, but asked him not to mention to anyone, would come in handy in the work that was needed. With danger and courage as partners, Alice and Jack, along with Merle and others, continued to work toward ending the war. Alice’s fear of getting into a boat again was great, but she overcame that fear, knowing what needed to be done. Would they succeed? What would be the outcome for Jack and Alice, for young Ned, Merle and the children?

The House at Mermaid’s Cove by Lindsay Jayne Ashford was a wonderful read. It went in a direction I didn’t expect, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. Alice’s character was of strength, humility and surprising courage, while Jack was portrayed perfectly for who and what he was. I have read one other of this author’s work and loved it - The Woman on the Orient Express, and have The Snow Gypsy waiting on my kindle – I'm keen to read more of Ms Ashford's now. Highly recommended.

With thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for my digital ARC to read in exchange for an honest review.

Erin

Rating: really liked it
Thanks to NetGalley and Lake Union Publishing for an egalley in exchange for an honest review.
3.5 stars

Well, I don't appear to be doing a very good job at sticking to my "no more WWII era books" but
I cannot resist this author and her books. Inspired by local lore, Lindsay Jayne Ashford takes readers to Cornwall, England where a mysterious woman washes up onshore. A survivor of a ship torpedoed by a German submarine, Alice, is rescued by local man, Jake Trewella. As Alice works on Jake's land in exchange for lodging, she cannot help but realize her growing admiration for her rescuer. Although the feeling does seem mutual, Alice is haunted by the decisions of her past. Will Jake accept her secrets? Will Alice be able to do the same?

I read this story in two sittings and I quite enjoyed it. The writing was engaging, the characters were interesting, but the romance was a bit so-so and predictable. It seemed a bit rushed in the last few chapters as we hurtled towards the end of the novel, but overall it was a satisfactory read.


Goodreads review published 24/07/20
Expected Publication 11/08/20






TheHouseatMermaidsCove #NetGalley

Karren Sandercock

Rating: really liked it
Alice McBride’s traveling from Africa and is returning home to Ireland and when her ship takes a direct hit from a German torpedo. She’s washed ashore on a deserted beach called Mermaid’s Cove in isolated Cornwall and found by Viscount Jack Trewella. He takes her to his boathouse, she’s freezing cold, has nasty cuts on her feet and she assures him she will be fine. Jack notices a few things about Alice that are a little odd, she’s wearing a chemise with a numbers on it, her hair is cut really short, she’s nervous and he wonders if she’s an escaped prisoner of war? Alice is in fact a nun, a trained nurse, she’s been struggling with her calling, now she has time to think about what she wants to do and she’s not sure if she wants to return to the convent in Ireland.

Once Alice’s feet heal, she’s keen to help out on Jacks farm, he has a team of land girls, and Alice pitches in, she helps with the milking and works in the vegetable garden. She makes friends with Merle Durand, she's been evacuated from the Channel Islands, with her three children and a little boy she’s looking after called Ned. Jack's been rather vague about what’s going on in his main house, he eventually explains to Alice that he and Merle are working for Churchill’s Secret Army. With Alice’s being able to speak French, she’s soon busy decoding messages and becomes involved with the resistance.

The House at Mermaid’s Cove is a wonderful story, I really liked Alice’s character, and she has courage, composure, dignity and strength. She has a positive influence on Jack, makes him understand, he needs to face his past and embrace his future with young Ned. The first book I have read by Lindsay Jayne Ashford, I thoroughly enjoyed it and I look forward to reading others.
I received a copy of this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review and four stars from me. https://karrenreadsbooks.blogspot.com/

Garg Ankit

Rating: really liked it
The House at Mermaid's Cove by Lindsay Jayne Ashford is a romance novet set in the World War 2 era. A woman washes ashore Cornwall in England, where she is rescued by a local Lord. She was on-board a ship that was torpedoed by a German U-boat. She then leaves her old life behind and starts a fresh one trying to help the war efforts.

The premise is interesting, but the story is strictly average. Predictable romance takes precedence over the war efforts, and the intense war background, the part which generally appeals to me more, seems to have been lost.

Thanks to the author and the publisher for the ARC.

Verdict: Not for WWII lovers.

Jennifer

Rating: really liked it
5⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
This book was such a delight. I had no idea It was about a shipwrecked girl during WWII. The romance had the mysterious feel of “Rebecca” for me, in the sense that I couldn’t figure out Jack’s feelings. He was mysterious and Alice misread all her surroundings, in part to her past.
I identified with Alice and her need to be authentic. I felt her struggle with God, and how everything she did was mechanically recited and done out of habit. She longed to have a heartfelt purpose in her life.
As the story progressed with the risks, I found I couldn’t put it down. I was holding my breath, anxious and thrilled at the flow of this wonderful writing.
This was more a historical, women’s literature book than romance. The romance was light and clean. I hope to one day visit the place this story took place. I very much liked the ending.
I highly recommend this and want you to read it.

Thank you NETGALLEY and the publisher for this ARC, in exchange for my honest review.

Lucinda

Rating: really liked it
This was a surprising book. First time I read this author and I was captivated from the beginning.

It's set in WWII, just before D-Day, in Cornwall and France. Alice washes ashore after the ship she was traveling in is sunk. Jack's dog finds her on the beach and he takes her to the boathouse until she can walk (her feet were injured).

Despite the circumstances, Jack and Alice build a tentative friendship. He's not sure of her at first, but he keeps providing clothes and food for her and when she gets better, he brings her to work at farmhouse. She then discovers he's actually a viscount.

I really liked Jack and Alice. They're both brave and doing all they can to help others around them. Although the story is told from Alice's first person POV, we come to know Jack through her eyes and those of others in the story.

I also enjoyed the secondary characters and their stories.

I received a copy from the publisher through NetGalley and this is my honest opinion.

Betül

Rating: really liked it
**ARC provided by publisher in exchange for an honest review**


The House at Mermaid's Cove is a fast-paced Historical Fiction with a bit of romance sprinkled into it. We start off when Alice is washed ashore and found by the intriguing Viscount Jack Trewella. It is a miracle that Alice has survived and she wants to start her life fresh without her past making an appearance. Jack doesn't really know what to make of her but offers her a place to stay in exchange of her helping around the farm until she figures out what she wants. Both characters were mysterious and I enjoyed getting to know them better the further I got into the story.

I have read a couple of books set during World War II, but I found this book to have an original plot and showed a different side with the focus on the French Resistance. I enjoyed all the side-characters and the development of the plot, however, I wanted the book to be longer. I was really getting into the story and before I knew it, it was over already. The story felt like it touched the surface of both the war, Resistance, friendships, and romance. The author didn't really go into depth with any of it, which unfortunately left me unsatisfied at the end. I wanted more background information on both main characters, and I wanted to see more growth in their relationship. I also was very intrigued by the operations of the Resistance, but I felt like we only got a quick peek into it. I do have to say that I enjoyed the writing style of the author, and I found it very easy to read. So I am planning on reading this author's other books.

Sophia

Rating: really liked it
A shipwrecked woman washes up on a Cornish shore and realizes the evidence of her past have sunk beneath the waves and she has the chance to start over. He rescues her and learns some of her secrets even while keeping a few of his own during the time of the second world war. A previous book that was thoroughly satisfying taught me to look on another book from the author with a sense of eagerness.

The story begins in 1943 when an Irish woman comes to consciousness on a lonesome beach pounded by surf and is rescued and cared for by a man and his dog. Her ship was torpedoed by a German sub and it dawns on her that she has a clean slate. Her shorn hair and thread bare chemise with numbers on the tag lead Lord Jack Trewella to suspicions that she was a prisoner of war or even a spy. Alice shares with Jack some of her story that she asks he keep to himself even as she strives to move on with her life and help where she can with the Land Girls in Jack's fields. Alice is just trying to regroup after the earlier years of her life have led her to something unexpected more than once and now this when she is stunned to discover what Jack has been keeping secret from her while he decides whether to trust her. This leads to a wholly new direction of the story into the shadowy parts of the war effort that Jack and some others are doing. If they survive, there is a growing possibility of something between them.

When I started reading, I had a whole different idea of where I thought this book was going and there were times I was content to pick something else up to read or listen to. Then it finally took off for me and finished strong.

Alice is introduced and is the sole narrator for the story. She encounters her rescuer Jack who is reserved at first even while interested in her though he wonders if she is a spy. Then there are others who were also displaced by the war and the locals not to mention the incredible descriptions of the area so it was like another major character. I thought the whole story would be a gentle tale of Alice starting new and getting over her past with a building romance. It had that, but also took a turn for the suspenseful when Jack approaches her with an incredible task that she is uniquely suited for. But, even then, the story never gets gritty like some WWII era stories can. It is softer even when things are in a tight spot for Alice. Part of that are the times it drops into the past as Alice remembers and works through what happened and comes to terms with it. The romance is strong and I liked Jack for her even though Alice was tentative and doubting, but in truth this is Alice's story of finding herself and finding her place.

This was my first time listening to Alana Kerr Collins as a narrator and I thought she did well with Alice's Irish accent and the rest of the cast including French accents. Her tone and pacing were a good fit to the story. I feel bad admitting that I never connected with her narration. There was nothing wrong and I can fully recommend her work, but it is a personal preference that I found her voice distracting and hard for me to settle into the story each time I jumped back in to listen.

All in all, it was a solid WWII romantic suspense story that was parts internal conflict, slow-burn romance, and tense suspense set in two engaging locations. This is only my second book by the author, but I've already got the urge to grab up another of her books since I enjoy her style. Historical fiction, romance, and suspense fans should definitely give this one a look.

My thanks to Brilliance Audio for the opportunity to listen to this book in exchange for an honest review.

smokeandmirrors

Rating: really liked it
I'm very much that boring nerd who has a weakness for World War II stories and, in particular, the World War II love stories which any self-respecting historian would probably try to set on fire in my hands, to teach me a lesson I would not learn. Naturally I was excited for this story, which was filled with promising elements: 1943, Cornwall, shipwreck, mermaid ?? It wound up not quite delivering; for everyone's convenience I have chopped my reaction into pieces and arranged them in a numbered list.

1. Narrative voice. This is probably my least helpful criticism but unfortunately it also affected me the most throughout; the narration of this book seemed eminently modern. I'm not even talking about our very hashtag woke hero/ine, I genuinely do not care if an author writes modern sensibilities into their work, but something about the way the words were arranged on the page -- very modern! I went on a kick earlier this year of reading books which actually came out in the 40s, so my standards here might just be unrealistic.

2. Setup and payoff. This isn't a mystery story, per se, but it has a bunch of mysteries in it, and some of them are handled competently but most of them are handled weirdly. Alice spends the first two chapters being very mysterious about where she comes from and why she's hiding, in line with the blurb, and then at the end of the second chapter -- the book has 27 chapters, for reference, so this happens extremely near the beginning and I don't feel bad about spoiling it -- she reveals that she's a nun not only to the reader but also to the hero, which basically removed all the suspense from the situation. It seems genuinely nuts to me that you wouldn't at least keep that fact from your hero and use it to build more tension between them as he chafes to figure out her whole deal? And then they could have spent the first six chapters circling around each other instead of being blandly nice, which, I'm sorry, bored me. The other really bonkers example of this weird defusing-tension is in a moment where Alice is talking to Merle, a friend of the hero's, who refers to Jack in the third person as "his lordship". Alice's reaction to this is "who is she talking about??" which didn't, like, delight me, but I assumed it was setting up a mystery for later which would enrich our understanding of Jack's behaviour next time he turns up. Instead Merle says on the very next page "he's so modest for a viscount" and Alice gets it. I guess I don't understand why you would set up the reveal, have Alice misunderstand, and then actually reveal it all in the same conversation. Surely at that point you can skip the misunderstanding? I don't think the author intended for me to think that Alice was a little dumb, which is unfortunately all I took out of that interaction.

3. Research. This is both a pro and a con, in that I know the author did research, because there were a few things which were explained in solid detail. Settings were done well in my opinion, as was the religious stuff and a brief episode of bell-ringing. Unfortunately the downside to this is that I felt I could also tell when the author was trying to gloss over things; quotidian details suffered. Period details in particular seemed awkward and shuffled in; the author relied a lot on Alice reading a copy of Frenchman's Creek to remind us we were in the 40s. There was also one weird moment where Alice looks at a banknote and describes it mostly for the benefit of the audience, surely, but since she had spent the last nine years in a nunnery I have to give that one a pass. The one I won't let go is when she, in 1934, longed to see Saratoga, which came out in 1937.

4. Modern sensibilities vs. Alice's backstory. So I said earlier that I didn't care if authors wrote modern attitudes into their work, and I stand by that; I am fine that our hero clearly drinks a healthy dose of woman respecting juice every day, I am fine with what is probably a wildly progressive view of religion and wholesale nunnery abandonment for the 1940s, I am even fine that Alice goes out of her way to benevolently declaim that Muslims worship the same God as Christians. What I am less fine with, in the wake of all this, is a very one-note portrayal of Alice's backstory as a Christian missionary in the Belgian Congo. We only ever hear about this from her in the present, but it very much falls into the cliche of "evil witch doctors did bad things :(" and having "won" souls over to Christianity, which, well, I simply didn't love!

5. Theme and plot. I found myself returning often to a sort of baffled refrain as I read, which was "what is this about??" which is perhaps not a good sign. First it was the story of a nun who wants to start life anew, and then it became, hm, a society romance and family drama, and then a spy caper? The question mark means I do not think the genre mashup was entirely successful. The mermaid thing that gets mentioned ominously in the summary does not pan out to be anything more than a local myth, which was sad for me on a personal level but probably a decent choice to avoid crowding the story more. Alice's arc was mostly that she felt bad about leaving the religious order, but was insistent that she had not stopped believing in God, and this was a successful subplot throughout in that she felt bad a lot, and towards the end she received external validation from a better nun, I guess, and felt better. Sorry, I'm being very glib, I know. There were good elements to this; the fact that she was asked to use a nun disguise in the spy caper tied these things together nicely for me. Unfortunately, the negatives outweighed the positives. The romance felt generally bland and basically nonexistent unless it was a specified romance moment, and the filial drama didn't work for me at all (view spoiler)[(I very much wished that Jack had killed his first lover, if only to make things more interesting) (hide spoiler)]. It annoyed me that Alice's stance never really changed or grew -- she starts out very sure that she can still be a good Christian and keeps being quite sure and then someone else validated this belief. It drove me absolutely bats that we only get the brief suggestion of a resolution to this, because it was the most consistent throughline of the book.

This list sounds like I hate the book, but I don't -- I think it could have been a lot better, but it works fine for what it is, which is a light, plot-driven drama. Modern or no, the writing went down easily, and I got through it fairly quickly over the space of a couple of days. I don't regret reading it, and I imagine that most people in the weird WWII romance niche would feel the same.

Thank you to NetGalley & Lake Union Publishing for an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

Margaret Crampton

Rating: really liked it
I really enjoyed this book which is a fascinating historical novel set in Cornwall up the Helford River (which I incidentally has special memories for me). Once over my surprise at the familiar setting I found this book to have romance, an exciting plot, insights into the life of a nun in a convent and the impact of WW2 on Cornwall and Cornish involvement in the French Resistance. I thoroughly recommend this book.

Rachel McMillan

Rating: really liked it
A lovely, immersive and wholly unique WWII historical romance featuring a lush, wonderfully-described locale and shades of Rebecca and Jane Eyre.

I thought the author masterfully wove the threads of a young woman who mysteriously washes up on shore in 1943 in an idyllic cove with the raging war just beyond as D-Day approaches.


Ruminative and emotional, Ashford's paints war from a different perspective, all while clearly savouring her spinning of Jack and Alice's soft love story.


A welcomely different take in a sea of WWII fiction and a lovingly told historical romance with just enough secrets of identity and hidden pasts to keep the pages turning

Julie McCarthy

Rating: really liked it
I thought it was a great book
I found the beginning a bit slow going
I enjoyed it from the second half more
The audible narration was excellent in a female Irish accent

Nicola

Rating: really liked it
I really liked this book! The storyline was quite unique and fascinating. A very different and engaging view point on WWII.
The first pages grab you as the story unfolds with a young woman, Alice, being washed up on a secluded beach in Cornwall, England. Her head is shaved and she’s wearing a smock with numbers stitched inside.
Her rescuer, Jack, learns Alice’s secret and they begin a friendship with each other as the war wages on.
This is a historical novel but with a different take on how the Cornish people helped the French Resistance.
A beautiful slow burn romance, intrigue, suspense, mystery and redemption.
The research the author put into this story is truly amazing. I really enjoyed the writing style of Lindsay Jayne Ashford and look forward to reading more from her.

Debra Lagemann

Rating: really liked it
7/20/2022. I highly recommend this book. As a Catholic, I appreciated and enjoyed, the background of Alice as a nun. I found some of the expectations of her as a nun back in those days rather shocking, but believable. I know they did not have an easy life. This particular order had some cruel ways about it. I'm grateful things are not like that anymore.

The references though, as she reflected on her days as a nun were very respectful, and she kept and lived her faith as a Catholic, after leaving.

I'm again in awe at the bravery of the people in the background who assisted in the success of the war efforts, and the risks they took.

I read and listened to this book. My husband joined me listening as we traveled and he liked the book, as well.