The Artist of Blackberry Grange by Paulette Kennedy

 

My thoughts

I always enjoy this author's books. While this was not my favorite it was still good. A creepy, gothic, ghost, sensual, type story. One that gave me goosebumps. 

While I did not like the main character, Sadie, at all, the story was good. I thought Sadie was too much. First of all she had been having an affair with a married man. The parts where she meets his wife were unbelievable. No woman ever truly wants to meet the other woman. Or one of the many other women as the case may be. Besides this though Sadie just grated on my nerves. She decides to go to Blackberry Grange and stay with her aunt who is suffering from dementia. The first night she's there she is left alone with her aunt. What was up there. Did Aunt Marguerite always stay alone at night. As she suffered from dementia I would not think so. But it's fiction right. Still...

I liked Aunt Marg. She was something else. An artist. And what an artist she was. Her portraits were so lifelike you could almost find yourself inside them. I felt bad for Marg. She seemed to be so lonely until Sadie arrived. Except for the gardner/driver and the nurse there was really no one there. No family. Just her and her paintings. Marg has a lot of secrets though. A whole lot...

You meet Sadie's relatives and oh my what a group. All seem so selfish and self-centered. I didn't like any of them. Not even their awful, spoiled, bratty, kids. Destructive little creatures is what they were. I kind of liked Beckett. He was Marg's gardner/driver and he cooked. Seems he was a great cook.

This story has a lot of ghostly things going on. A lot of sexual tension it seems. I didn't much find parts of that believable either. I mean, a ghost. Really? But again it's fiction. And gothic. And a horror story too. Anything can happen in a fiction story afterall... And boy does it.

I did enjoy this book. It was well written and in places edge of your seat scary. While some characters, most of them, I didn't like there were some I did. Even though parts were unbelievable it was still very good. This author has a way of pulling you into her books and not letting you go until the very end. And what an ending. That part made me cry. It was perfect...

Thank you NetGalley and the publisher for this ARC.     

About

For a young caregiver in the Ozarks, an old house holds haunting memories in a ghostly novel about family secrets, sacrifice, and lost loves by the author of The Devil and Mrs. Davenport.

In the summer of 1925, the winds of change are particularly chilling for a young woman whose life has suddenly become unbalanced.

Devastated by her mother’s death and a cruel, broken engagement, Sadie Halloran learns that her great-aunt Marguerite, a renowned artist now in the throes of dementia, needs a live-in companion. Grasping at newfound purpose, Sadie leaves her desolate Kansas City boardinghouse for Blackberry Grange, Marguerite’s once-grand mansion sitting precariously atop an Arkansas bluff. Though Marguerite is a fading shell of the vibrant woman Sadie remembers, Marguerite is feverishly compelled to paint eerie, hallucinatory portraits of old lovers—some cherished, some regretted, and some beastly. All of them haunting.

With each passing night, time itself seems to shift with the shadows at Blackberry Grange. As truth and delusion begin to blur, Sadie must uncover the secrets that hold Marguerite captive to her past before reality—and Marguerite’s life—slips away entirely.