The Memory House
While suspended from the New York City Police Department for assaulting a drug dealer and leaving the scene with the dealer’s abused mini-schnauzer, Sgt. Beck Holiday learns that she has inherited the house at 7 Memory Lane, in Fernandina Beach, Florida, from a woman neither she nor her family had heard from for years. As she adjusts to her new home, she meets Bruno Endicott, a man she does not remember, even though they had spent summers together when her family vacationed across the street from Memory House in her teen years. Endicott, the Memory House, and Florida are not the only parts of Beck’s life she cannot remember. Selective amnesia has fogged her recollections ever since her father’s body was found in the rubble of one of the Twin Towers on 9/11.
The owner of the house, Everleigh Applegate, faced her own devastating loss—the death of her husband during a 1953 tornado in Waco, Texas.
The Memory House is the latest in a series of inspirational novels by author Rachel Hauck, winner of the Inspirational Novel of the Year award by Romantic Times Book Club for The Wedding Dress. The novel probes guilt and grief and the unwillingness of survivors to remember sudden tragic losses not only because they fear they will uproot buried feelings but also because new experiences may begin to slowly replace thoughts of deceased loved ones in their hearts.
The novel revisits common themes in Hauck’s books: courtship and Christian values. It is well-written and covers well-traveled ground, comfortable in its steadfast delivery and message of the acceptance of closures to make way for the promise of openings. It is not focused on individual tragedy and grieving but a universal tale of faith and love.
