As I was looking for the last reads of my completed cannonball, only one more to go after this one (!!!) I wanted something light and fun to enjoy through the holiday season and I was positively delighted to discover I had this unread Sarah Addison Allen delight on my bookshelf. I discovered her early in her career and managed to go to a book event when I was living in Tennessee where I was the last attendee and remember being completely tongue-tied about it but she was a delightful human. Thus solidified my devotion and fanship to her, and her novels.
This book is just like all of her previous novels, romantic, mystical and lighthearted. Her breakout novel was Garden Spells which introduced two sisters and a story that could certainly be seen as inspired by Alice Hoffman’s Practical Magic. If you haven’t read any of Allen’s novels or heard of her, imagine a lighter more soothing Alice Hoffman, like the movie version of Practical Magic, which is only the first 1/3 of the book which goes to darker places.
In this book, Kate has been sleepwalking through grief following the untimely and sudden death of her husband, and an old postcard leads her back to a summer of her youth, at her estranged great-aunts Lost Lake, a sleepy camp of bygone days in rural Georgia. There is a colorful cast of characters and I really enjoyed following the story to its somewhat obvious but comforting conclusion.
There are a few plot points that under normal circumstances would make me arch an eyebrow, but I give Allen a lot of latitude and don’t take it too seriously. If you are looking for something in the beachy read genre, I would say that this is a stellar choice, as are any of her other novels.