The House By the Sea

This review first appeared on my blog: http://www.knittingandsundries.com/2011/05/egalley-wednesday-may-18-2011-mermaid...

The Mermaid Garden flows from past to present and back almost effortlessly.

The past: A young girl named Floriana in Tuscany, whose mother is believed to have run off with a man and left her with her drunken father. She has unlimited freedom to explore, and as she is looking over the wall of a villa that she likes to visit, she meets a boy named Dante, whose family owns the villa. He invites her in to explore the garden, and they become friends. She even falls in love with him a little bit, despite the fact that she is only 10 and he is a teenager going off to school at the end of the summer. We follow her and her show more friend Costanza, whose mother only allows her to play with Floriana because there are no "children of quality" for her to play with, through the following summers as they both become frequent visitors to the villa.

The present: Marina and Grey Turner run the Polzanze Hotel. One of Marina's sorrows is that she has no children of her own, and her stepchildren, especially Grey's 23-year-old daughter Clementine, don't treat her as a mother, even though she has been in their lives since they were very small children. In fact, Clementine is bitter, resentful, and selfish, lamenting the fact that she is no longer free to travel and "find herself", because she now has to work and make her own living.

When Marina decides to bring in an "artist-in-residence" to help the failing fortunes of the hotel, both past and present will come together.

I loved the writing style of this novel. The prose was very descriptive and the emotions and character-development were spot on. As usual for me, I liked the story set in the past a bit better :). There were, however, a few things that didn't ring true for me, and they are the reason this is not a five-star rating. Clementine - well, there's no way that you can go from being a spoiled, selfish, grown-up brat overnight to an understanding and loving person the next day. It just doesn't happen like that. Her romance also wasn't fully-formed and fleshed-out; it came up lacking in my view. BUT, those were the only sticking points for me, as the book kept me interested from start to finish. I was able to figure out early on what the mystery/secret would be, but that didn't keep me from wanting to know how it would all come out in the end. A gorgeous read.

QUOTE (from a galley; may be different in final copy):

Marina's good mood evaporated as Clementine sucked the air out of the room, replacing it with her dark presence. She glanced at her husband and felt nothing but contempt for her stepdaughter, who constantly rebuffed him. show less

I found that the Mermaid Garden had a cliched plot. There was also a lot of purple prose that I skipped over. The characters were endearing, but I wished she had gotten deeper into a few of the characters rather than write about so many. Over all it was an okay read, but not engrossing.

Really enjoyable return to form for Santa, but the mystery was glaringly obvious. Nevertheless very good.

This was a very sweet love story on several levels. I enjoyed the way the author portrayed a not so perfect family in a very real way and their trials in life.

A interesting story a cut above a “ Harlequin romance”. It spends generations Going back and forth from an beautiful Italian villa and a charming county inn in England .

I liked the story concept,and the characters.The locales were lovely. I liked the character development.
But the story just moved too slow, I gave up halfway thru the book.It just needed some energy to move along.

Will finish this book but I hope her other books move a little quicker then this one did.