Review: Winter Cottage by Mary Ellen Taylor

A gripping novel about family secrets…and coming home for the first time.
Still grieving the loss of her wandering, free-spirited mother, Lucy Kincaid leaves Nashville for the faded town of Cape Hudson, Virginia. She goes to see the house she’s inherited—one she never knew existed, bequeathed to her by a woman she’s never even met. At the heart of this mystery is the hope that maybe—just maybe—this “Winter Cottage” will answer the endless questions about her mother’s past…including the identity of her birth father.
Rather than the quaint Virginian bungalow Lucy expected, Winter Cottage is a grand old estate of many shadows—big enough to hold a century of secrets, passions, and betrayals. It also comes with a handsome and enigmatic stranger, a man next in line to claim Lucy’s inheritance.
Now, as Lucy sifts through the past, uncovering the legacy of secrets that Winter Cottage holds, she’ll come to discover as much about her family history as she does about herself. In searching, she could finally find the one thing she’s never really had: a home.

Kindle Edition

Expected publication: October 1st 2018 by Montlake Romance

Kristine's Thoughts:

** I received an advanced readers copy from Montlake Romance via NetGalley in exchamge for an honest review. Thank you!**

Winter Cottage was the story of different generations of people with a house in Cape Hudson in common. It weaved back and forth in time to connect the dots to present day. Lucy inherited the cottage, which was not a cottage at all, from a woman she had never met in a town she had never heard of that had a direct link to her recently deceased mother. With nowhere else to go and in the hopes of getting some answers she travelled from Nashville with her mother's dog to do just that. The cottage came with some conditions though. Lucy had to live there for at least a month and and all of the money attached to it was meant only for renovations to the house. On top of that, she wasn't the only one wanting the house or land attached to it. Also, she seemed to unintentionally inherit a young girl as well.

I was all in with this book. This was the type of book that I generally always enjoy. A story with secrets that span generations that unfold to make sense of the present. I wanted to know what Lucy's connection to the past was and why she was gifted the house. The house swept me away and I was enjoying all aspects of it. In this type of story I normally enjoy the past story the most but I found myself enjoying Lucy and the present day story equally as much. I especially enjoyed her relationship with her unintentional house guest and I wanted to know why her mother left and never looked back.

The story flowed nicely and it was easy to get caught up in the plot and the setting. I found Cape Hudson and it's characters so charming and easy to like. I almost felt like I was there and experiencing everything with Lucy in the present and Beth and Claire in their respective pasts. It was no wonder that I was able to finish this book so quickly. One sitting was all it took.

This was the first book for me by Mary Ellen Taylor but judging by how much I enjoyed it, it certainly won't be the last. I very much look forward to what she comes out with next and will be sure to check out her previous work.

About the Author

Mary Ellen Taylor grew up in a southern family that embraced stories of all kinds, from a well-told anecdote to a good yarn or a tall tale. It may have been inevitable that Taylor would take her storytelling heritage to new heights, moving beyond the oral tradition to become a published author.

Taylor, who finds cooking and baking to be important creative outlets, explores some of the challenges and comforts of those pursuits in her Alexandria set novels THE UNION STREET BAKERY, SWEET EXPECTATIONS, AT THE CORNER OF KING STREET and THE VIEW FROM PRINCE STREET. The novels, which explore themes of family, adoption, belonging and personal history, are influenced by her life and family. Both her grandmother and her daughter were adopted, as is Daisy McCrae, the protagonist in her first novel written as Mary Ellen Taylor, THE UNION STREET BAKERY.

Taylor was born and has spent most of her life in Richmond, but also lived in Alexandria for four years. She received her degree in English from Virginia’s Hollins University, and worked in marketing and sales before she became convinced she could write and sell one of the many stories swirling in her head. Today, twenty-eight of her romance and suspense novels and five novellas written as Mary Burton have been published, earning praise from readers and reviewers and have made her a New York Times and USA Today bestselling author. THE UNION STREET BAKERY was her first novel as Mary Ellen Taylor.

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