The Forgotten Cottage
This dual-time novel set in North Yorkshire connects several generations of women through one cottage in a tiny village. In 2014, Audrey inherits a cottage from her beloved grandmother after caring for her for the past year. Feeling adrift and insecure, Audrey senses that she needs to see this cottage before ultimately selling it and trying to return to a life that has fallen to pieces. Once there she discovers a cottage frozen at the time her grandmother fled to the U.S. in 1941 at the age of seventeen. What isn’t clear is why she left and what happened to the rest of her family.
In 1915, Lady Emily feels trapped by her aristocratic family until she falls in love and dares to escape. Spurning the man she is supposed to marry and pushing away the man she loves feels like the only way for Emily to remain free. She becomes a nurse in the VAD (Voluntary Aid Detachment) and is sent to a field hospital in France. As Audrey peels back the layers of history hidden in the cottage, she finds her own strength and the courage to take back control of her life.
This is an emotional and engaging story that keeps the pages turning. So often in dual-timeline novels one of the timelines takes over or has a more alluring pull. In this case, I found the stories of Audrey and Emily equally compelling, though one of the endings is necessarily more satisfying than the other. A warning, though: the cozy cottage setting evokes strong urges to brew a pot of tea and curl up under a blanket to finish this novel in one sitting.
