Series: None
Author: Jessica Spotswood
Published May 3rd 2016 by Sourcebooks Fire
Goodreads Synopsis
The summer before Ivy’s senior year is going to be golden; all bonfires, barbeques, and spending time with her best friends. For once, she will just get to be. No summer classes, none of Granddad’s intense expectations to live up to the family name. For generations, the Milbourn women have lead extraordinary lives—and died young and tragically. Granddad calls it a legacy, but Ivy considers it a curse. Why else would her mother have run off and abandoned her as a child?
But when her mother unexpectedly returns home with two young daughters in tow, all of the stories Ivy wove to protect her heart start to unravel. The very people she once trusted now speak in lies. And all of Ivy’s ambition and determination cannot defend her against the secrets of the Milbourn past….
Goodreads
Review
I received an Advance Reader Copy from the publisher via NetGalley. This in no way impacted on my view.
Being a Milbourn woman, Ivy has known from a young age she was expected to have an extraordinary life. From her great-grandmother down, the women in her family have been magnificent, but very troubled, and she feels lacklustre and mediocre that she is just good at everything, and not a prodigy in any particular ventures. Abandoned by her teenage mother, she's lived with her grandfather her whole life, and is starting to be comfortable with knowing her mother left her. But now, the summer before her senior year, her mother returns, along with her two younger half-sisters, who think she is their aunt, and it's clear her mam has never cared about her. Over the course of two weeks, can Ivy come to terms with her own life, and grow to understand her mam a little bit more?
I've been on a binge of overdue NetGalley arcs recently, and this was one I needed to read. I liked it, and read it all in a day, but if I'm completely honest, it was a bit blah. I mean, I'm writing this now less than two hours after I finished the book - which I only started about 12 hours ago, and did work around it - and I've already gone hazy on some aspects of it. Erica - the mam - was awful, and yes, I think the expectations of her father, and the grief she felt after her mother's suicide exacerbated it all, but her treatment of Ivy was abhorrent. Ivy was an okay character, nothing bad, nothing really exceptional about her, and I liked seeing her come to terms with being an older sister, and caring for Grace and Isobel in the short time she knew them. There was some romance with Connor, which again, was nice, but I hated the way Alex and Ivy's friendship imploded. There's also a range of diversity too, of gender, sexuality, and race, which was a pleasant surprise when I started it. All in all, it was an okay book - nothing special, but not bad either.
Dates Read:
January 29, 2021
Rating
3 Stars
