Review: A Cottage by the Sea by Ciji Ware

June 27th, 2010 | 4 Stars, ARC, Children, Divorced, Gothic, Great Britain, Guest Reviews, Love Triangle, Suspense/Thriller, Time Travel, V-Z

by Karin, guest reviewer from Savvy Thinker

A Cottage by the Sea by Ciji Ware is being reissued -- it is a good choice for reissue for those of us, like me, who never read it the first time -- with some

new material on brain function, chemistry, and recent findings in the scientific literature about the power of our minds to make us sick or well.

This book is an interesting mix of genres -- romance, romantic suspense, gothic romance, possible time travel, and possible past life experiences. Hypnosis figures into it also.

Where past, present, and future collide...

Blythe Barton Stowe has fled to Cornwall to heal from a nasty, public divorce from her successful Hollywood husband. He was unfaithful to her in the most egregious way, with her sister, who is now pregnant with the child her husband refused to conceive with her. Blythe had been an important part of their successful movie team in her own right, but the way she was treated in the divorce proceedings did not grant her that.

The saving grace is that even her lawyer helps her stay far from the limelight -- which shows the kind of loyalty Blythe inspires. Immediately this gave me insight into her character.

Cornwall is where her family line began, or so the story has been told her. So it seems a natural place for her to go to heal her wounds. She is understandably angry, hurt, and wanting a kind of revenge that she refuses to nurse. The disloyalty of her sister and her then-husband, now -ex, is more than she can bear, made more so because of his immediate remarriage upon the divorce. And you can imagine the field day the paparazzi are having at her expense.

Once she gets to the wild coastline in Cornwall, unusual things begin to happen. She finds herself pulled back into the past on more than one occasion, when she touches the glass of a genealogy chart. Some of the past life happenings (or life in the past) were scary to me, not knowing where they will lead. It seems as though she is living out some kind of karmic present life, which is different from the past, but seems to stem from it.

Along the way, she falls in love with the owner of the estate she is living on (which also happens to be the family estate she comes from.)

A lot of information is given about brain function in situations of complex grieving, but it never crosses into didactism. It just seems part of the story. This is a feat in itself and shows what a good writer Ware is.

While several of the reviewers on the cover mention staying up all night to finish reading the book, I read it more slowly than some I read, in order to savor the story and its environs. At the same time, this was because of the gothic nature of it. I wasn't sure where it was going or if I'd like to know. This also made it more difficult for me, because I wanted to know where it was going and I wanted to get there faster.

Generally I do not read historical romance (and the historical part was not particularly romantic, it was more tragic and involved a triangle of sorts or a quadrangle and this put it into the gothic category, with the steep clifts, etc.) I was never quite sure if Blythe would decide to end it all, not necessarily because she was led that way, but because her leaping into the past was making her question her sanity, to a degree. And it is interesting that one of the characters in the past does commit suicide and is not in his right mind when he does it. And there is a suspected death/suicide which didn't in reality happen.

If you like an interesting story, with the need to suspend reality to a degree, and you like gothic romances, even a modern one, this book is for you. It was a very interesting read with well developed characters, including a child and another woman who desires to become the estate owner's wife. There is also a nice settling of the differences with her ex-husband, made easier because she was now in love with another man. It was definitely a good read, albeit sometimes difficult to read. It is a thinking woman's romance, not escapism. It deals with complex issues in an interesting way.

Have you read this one, either in its first printing or now in its second?

Rating: I give it 4 stars.

Buy: A Cottage by the Sea