Susanna Kearsley is such a beloved novelist. Her stories transport you to another time and place. "Bellewether" does this as well. Such a great novel.

Not my favourite Susanna Kearsley book but LOVED the Canadain content. I thought is was overall a bit of a slow novel, with not much happening. The history was very interesting though, as a fellow Canadian and her romance is always spot on.

2.5 stars: Thanks to NetGalley and Simon & Schuster Canada for an advanced digital copy of this book in return for an honest review.

You may enjoy this book if you like: historical fiction, Canadian authors, dual timeline told with a historical POV and a present-day POV, romance, ghosts, historical research.

A good historical read with lots of detail. I like the dual timeline and always enjoy a story with someone who is doing historical research but the pacing was slow, the ghost story wasn't scary and I didn't love the romance.

Susanna Kearsley has quickly become a favourite author. I am absolutely obsessed with her ability to weave factual history with a fictional romance. Unlike typical historical romances, the reader really gains an education based on this time period - the Seven Years War and the tensions between New France and the American colonists. As a high school history, this time period is right in my wheel house so it was neat being able to place some of these people and places in my own understanding. The slow burn and angst between the two protagonists was frustrating at times - but only because I figured they didn't have a chance at a long future so they needed to get together ASAP. The only critique I have for this book is that the final scene wasn't quite as satisfying as I wanted it to be. But ultimately this shows Kearlsey's expertise in storytelling, as I didn't want the story to end! 4.75 stars for this absolute must read.

I attended a local book signing to meet the author for this book. I've read every book she's ever written and was prepared to love this one as well as her others. It lacked just a tinge of the urgency and passion of The Winter Sea, Mariana, and my personal favourite - The Rose Garden. While the developing romance between her historical characters is fraught with tension and the reader waits for calamity to strike, there isn't the same conflict or surprise in the contemporary love story that there is in her other books. And the debated twist ending of the book left something to be desired. I was really rooting for this book, having waited two years for it to be published, and wish I could give it 5 stars. Especially when it's based on the author's own family history. I just wanted MORE depth in both story lines and more passion. And naming the book after the ship in the historical line didn't really seem to capture the essence of the story.

Susanna Kearsly writes some of the most well researched, fascinating books. They are quiet and sometimes a bit slow moving, but for me that enhances the experience more than anything. Her books are ones I continually reread, and this one is the same. I can’t wait to read her next book.

I received a digital copy of this book from Simon and Schuster Canada and Netgalley for an honest review. I really enjoyed this book. There is a mix of a present day story and a historical story with a ghost story thrown in. I’m not usually too fond of ghost elements but it worked for me in this book. This book was well researched historically. Charley is one of the main characters and her story is present day. She moves to Long Island to work as a curator for a museum. The historical part of the book is the story of the previous owners of the house that is now the museum. Lydia is one of the central figures in the historical story as an occupant of the house. Jean-Philippe’s story is also told in the historical part as he is a French Canadian officer sent to live with Lydia’s family as a form of imprisionment during the late 18th century. There are both Canadian and American details in the book. There is also some romance in the book but not in great detail. Overall a very interesting and entertaining book. There was also a bit of a twist at the end that I was glad happened.

Susanna Kearsley has spun a tale, both enthralling and memorable. Charley has been given the opportunity to fill in blanks in both her family’s history, and the history of the local museum. With the help of the local handyman and the resident ghost, she may just find the answers. A romantic, addictive story.

I did not enjoy this book as much as I was hoping to enjoy this title. It is a great historical novel, but I found the writing style choppy, which made it hard to follow the story. The story drew my attention at the beginning, but did not keep it throughout the narrative.

I received an ARC from the publisher via Netgalley in exchange for a review.

This book was a double romance, one version taking place in the present, and the other taking place during the war between the French and British colonies in the mid 1700's. Both stories piggybacked off the other and it was interesting to see how the generations of families continued over the years. It is also a ghost story, but in this case, the ghost has good intentions.
Historically it was interesting to read about the attitudes during the time periods as well as see the rules of war in action. I had no idea that prisoners of war were released for the winter, only to come back and fight on during the spring. Nor did I have any idea, that prisoners were billeted by the enemy for however long.
It was a cute story, and I did learn quite a bit. I got a bit frustrated with the way the book is narrated. It takes turns between 3 characters in the same order. I found myself really getting into one story, only to have it abruptly end, and I'd have to switch out into the past again.
Good, quick read and I'd recommend

interesting story but i did not like the change in story line from past to present, i found it difficult to keep all the characters straight.

I’ve been a huge fan of Susanna Kearsley’s books for a few years now. The Winter Sea and The Firebird, along with A Desperate Fortune are three of my favourite books, so I was excited when Bellewether was announced, especially because the setting is completely different from Kearsley’s other books, which have been set in the UK and Europe.

I hate to lead with the negative, but I’ll get it out of the way so I can focus on the positive. Within a few pages of the book, I remembered something I’ve thought with every one of Kearsley’s other books I’ve read: she’s a fantastic storyteller, but not a great writer. Her style is awkward and choppy, with a lot of telling instead of showing (for example, saying ‘He explained’ before a line of dialogue when the dialogue itself should stand on its own), and she constantly breaks up dialogue with tags thrown in the middle, which I find really off-putting. All of this combined makes it hard for me to turn off what I call my ‘editor brain’. I found it jarring and it made it hard to really sink into the story because I was constantly being pulled out of it.

With that being said, Kearsley really is a fantastic storyteller. I love how she weaves the past and present together, and I love learning about historical events and time periods I didn’t know much about previously (I’ve always said that until Outlander, almost everything I knew about the Jacobites came from Kearsley’s books). It’s obvious Kearsley puts a ton of work, thought, heart, and research into her books.

I had a couple of personal connections to Bellewether that made me enjoy it even more. I honestly knew next to nothing about the Seven Years’ War, so it was all new and fascinating to me. I loved the ties to Canada and that Jean-Phillipe was Canadian, and I also loved that Kearsley included an Acadian character, since my family is Acadian and they’re so rarely seen in historical books (the only book I’ve read about the Acadians is Genevieve Graham’s Promises to Keep). Something else I really appreciated was that Sam was Mohawk; it’s rare to find Indigenous characters in literature, and I’ve never come across Mohawk characters (other than the love interest in one of my own novels). I live about five minutes outside a Mohawk reserve, so it was nice to feel that personal connection to the various characters.

As always, the romances were fantastic. Kearsley is a master of slow burn, and I loved watching Charley and Sam, and Lydia and Jean-Phillipe slowly fall in love. Another aspect I enjoyed was the haunting. It was so creepy, I ended up dreaming about ghosts in my own home, and had to stop reading the book late at night!

Overall, I really enjoyed Bellewether and would definitely recommend it to lovers of historical fiction.

2.5 stars Oh dear...this book was disappointing for me on so many levels. It sounded incredibly intriguing and seemed to have all of my favourite elements including a fascinating historical back drop, war, romance and even a paranormal aspect. Unfortunately I found it challenging to care and engage in the plot. I will even admit there was an instance about a third of the way through in which I considered abandoning it altogether although I'm glad that I pushed on. The second half of the book picked up a little.

Bellewether is the name of a ship owned by one of the Wilde brothers and captained by his younger brother. Although there is reference to the Bellewether and a small plot line that focuses on the ship, most of the story is really about the history of the house owned by the Wilde's and a rumoured romance between Lydia Wilde and a French soldier that is said to have ended tragically and the source of a modern day haunting. The author uses two timelines - 1759: and present day - to build mystery and invoke a first hand account of life in the 18th century. I quite enjoyed the 1759 timeline - told from Lydia and Jean-philippe's POV's - but aside from the ghost element, found the modern day time line - told from Charley's perspective - to drag. Charley has her own family dysfunction and has recently been hired as a curator for the Wilde house turned museum. Charley's plot line felt one dimensional and somewhat contrived.

If I could pinpoint one suggestion it would be to PLEASE EDIT THIS STORY! Oh my goodness, it felt long and the descriptive prose was overwhelming. I think taking several paragraphs or pages to describe a setting or an element like a room in a house was excessive and could have been edited to a sentence or two. I felt bogged down by the unimportant detail. I wanted more focus on the characters' emotions, what made them human and their internal struggles. The war was referenced and a central theme but again I craved more historical detail of its impact on the characters. The romance was too slow with description interfering in its emotional development. I wanted to feel depth but instead felt removed and detached. And the ghost story...don't even get me started...while there was so much opportunity to invoke a little spookiness or an eerie chill, there wasn't any and it became more of an afterthought. There was a little mystery as to who the ghost was but that's as far as it went.

I really don't like to criticize as I appreciate all of the hard work that goes into writing a book but I felt quite let down by this one. It promised big things but the execution fell flat. Not a book for those looking for strong emotional connection. May be better suited to readers who enjoy flowery narrative descriptions and a slow moving plot.

This is the first book by this Author that I have read but I know it will not be the last one. This is a well-written story that I could not put down once I had started it. I received a copy of this book and I am voluntarily reviewing it.

Thanks to NetGalley and Simon & Schuster Canada for an ARC of this novel for my honest opinion. The description of the novel was enticing to me and I thought it would be a good novel, though it didn’t keep my interest as I found it to be long and boring. The writing itself was good and flowed, though, unfortunately did not hold my attention or kept me riveted to the story.

Once again Susanna Kearsley brings both the past and the present wonderfully to life, with a historical narrative as compelling as her contemporary one. Family, community and romantic relationships deftly weave together into a story I could hardly bear to put down. I also learned about aspects of Canadian, American and world history I hadn’t known before, without ever being distracted from the characters’ personal story. Highly recommended!

( 3.5 Stars )

I don’t generally gravitate towards historical fiction, but I adore Susanna Kearsley’s books, likely because she mixes the historical romance with a tinge of supernatural and always sweeps me away to a realm somewhere between reality and fantasy. She is an author I keep tabs on, so I was thrilled when Simon and Schuster Canada sent me a copy of her new book, Bellwether.

Bellwether follows the reliable standard for a lot of Kearsley’s books; we have a present day woman somehow stumbling onto a mystery from the past that she has to untangle and figure out. This time around, it’s Charley, a museum curator who joins a team at an old house-turned-museum and dives deep into the star-crossed love story of Lydia Wilde and a French-Canadian soldier name Jean-Phillipe.

I always enjoy Kearsley’s writing and characters. The women are strong and colourful, standing their ground and always very lively. The historical facts are interesting and relevant, but they aren’t overwhelming, which for someone like myself who isn’t totally fixated on history, is a blessing. There’s enough to ignite an interest and perhaps offer a lesson about the events of that era, but not too much as to completely dominate the story itself. She always creates a beautiful balance.

While I enjoyed the story of Ms. Wilde and her Canadian soldier, I wasn’t entirely wooed by this book. I felt that the romances, both the historical and the present, weren’t given enough time to properly blossom and build, like I’ve seen in other books. It seemed like in each case, the characters were harbouring interests and flirting with the concept, and then all of a sudden they were involved. I felt that previous books spent a bit more time in between, building that relationship, and I usually quite enjoyed that.

I also felt that the supernatural element this time around was far too subtle. It didn’t really give a lot of weight to the story, it was meant to be helpful to present day Charley, but she pretty much discovered everything on her own anyway and I think eliminating this aspect from the book wouldn’t have really changed anything significant in it.

As always, this was beautifully written, but I felt like it was a little slow moving and anti-climactic. It was a nice story, but not much really happened other than the romance elements and as I mentioned, I felt those could have been a little more thoroughly explored. But Kearsley does always provide a wonderful balance between fact and fiction, past and present, and I will always gravitate to whatever she puts out.

I love historical fiction. Even more when there’s a connection to the present, like with this book. And even even more when there’s romance. And it did help that it involved a French Canadian soldier, since I live in Quebec... I love to know more about history. I really loved that book. It’s beautifully written, and the change of perspective between Lydia, Jean-Philippe and Charley is captivating.

Thanks to the publisher for the advanced ebook through NetGalley.

I have long been waiting to read a book by Susanna Kearsley and I savored this novel page by page. Although the story build-up is slow, it's what ended up making me like this book all the more. Best of all, I loved the Canadian history and how it unfolded to reveal how the Colonial Wars between the British and French colonies affected the local people. The setting was familiar to me as I live in Montreal, Quebec and have been to some of the places mentioned in this book.

Bellewether is a dual timeline story alternating between the present and 1759, with exactly the same setting and events unfolding in the same house but during two different time periods. In the present we have Charley who is the new curator of the Wilde House Museum. She has a "meh" relationship with her boyfriend and has moved in with her college-age niece who is now alone since Charley's brother died. Charley loves researching the history of the Wilde house and her discoveries follow the story that takes place in 1759 when the Wilde family take in two enemy French officers, POWs on parole of honour.

Lydia Wilde is the only daughter in a house of men (her mother died) and she and French-Canadian lieutenant Jean-Philippe de Sabran are not happy to be in the same house together. The presence of the French officers further strains the already tense atmosphere by Lydia's youngest brother who also fought in the war against the French.
This is where Kearsley's writing talent comes into play. She creates a tense situation and realistically builds on how the family and the officers had to learn to co-habit even as the war is still raging and they do not speak the same language. I loved how the relationship and eventual love between Lydia and Jean-Philippe builds, like a slow burn. Kearsley shows how even during war, or despite it, people have the same fears, needs and compassion no matter which side they are on. She peels back the layers of their personalities during this highly conflicting time, which only adds to the pleasure of their relationship.

There is a ghost in this story, which I tolerated as I do not like or read ghost stories. As with most dual timeline stories I have read, I seem to find one timeline more interesting than the other. In this case, the historical timeline or Lydia's story was more interesting to me, even as I enjoyed the present day story. I loved how Kearsley brings both stories together by the end of the novel and how she built the mystery of what really happened between Lydia and Jean-Philippe. Is there any truth to their tragic legend?

If you are a fan of Kearsley's novels then you will enjoy this new story. If you are reading her work for the first time, this novel has her signature mystery/paranormal/historical richness evident in all her books. This was an enjoyable and highly satisfying read for me.

A new Susanna Kearsley book is cause for celebration. As Bellewether was a long time coming, I was tickled all the colours of the rainbow to read it. It is, at least initially, a novel that felt quieter than others Kearsley has written. I thought the first half of the narrative meandered, like a ship unmoored, like the ship it’s named after and like the bopping ghost-light in the Long Island forest that beckons to Kearsley’s contemporary heroine. Bellewether felt deceptively benign, but Kearsley’s hand steered the narrative ship on a sure course and it sneaks up on you how masterfully she does so when you experience the novel’s last third. It’s not as visceral a read as The Winter Sea, or as gothic-y and deliciously-Mary-Stewart-ish as Named Of the Dragon, but it sure is wonderful.

Signature Kearsley, Bellewether is a double narrative: made of a contemporary heroine in search of discovering something of the past, a past that is meaningful and significant to her in a more-than-scholarly way. And there is a historical narrative, centred on people caught up in a particular era meeting, loving, and redeeming the losses and griefs of their pasts. The most wonderful idea that I took away from Bellewether is that we should never allow historical circumstance, the sweeping canvas of power and politics, to blind us to the possibility of HEA.

Kearsley is a master at the double narrative, reminding me of Byatt’s Possession (without the pretension, though). The novel opens with the story of a house, or rather the house seems to tell the story of its inhabitants. The Long-Island-set Wilde House has seen war, suffering, the loss of one country and making of another. Our contemporary heroine, Charlotte “Charley” Van Hoek arrives at the Hall-McPhail Museum to act as curator, to raise the museum’s profile by renovating it and unearthing what she can about the house’s great revolutionary hero, Benjamin Wilde, ” … daring privateer, a dashing hero of the Revolution, and – if one could trust the portraits – devilishly handsome”. As Charley notes, “The house, when I first saw it, seemed intent on guarding what it knew within its walls as long as it stayed standing; but we all learned, by the end of it, that secrets aren’t such easy things to keep.” It isn’t long after Charley’s arrival that she learns of the house’s eighteenth-century-hailed ghostly presence, a lantern that sways with the movement of one walking through the forest at night, reputed to be a French officer leading his love, Lydia Wilde, down to the water to their escape. That officer, Jean-Philippe de Sabron, had apparently been shot by Lydia’s brother, Joseph, a man who’d suffered from what we’d understand is PTSD after seeing battle at the Fort of Oswego during the French and Indian War.

Charlotte has additional reasons for taking this curatorial work. Niels, her brother, died recently and Charley wants to look after Rachel, her niece, to grieve together, eat together, normalize things as much as they can and get Rachel back to college. Kearsley balances Charley’s historical sleuthing with Charley’s complicated family history, as well as the goings on in the Wilde household, circa French and Indian War, especially the love between daughter of the house Lydia and the French officer captured in war, who is brought into their household until an exchange is settled between British and French powers-that-be.

Other than the snickeringly hilarious goings-on of museum board politics, which Charley navigates beautifully, a gorgeous man walks into Charley’s life in the form of one of the the famous Mohawk sky-walkers, the iron workers of Kahnawake et. al. (near Montreal, my native town!). Sam Abrams is a warm, gently humorous man, a fixer of doors, meticulous workman, architect, and rescuer of anxious dogs. His beagle Bandit, who needs doggy daycare until a resident labradoodle picks on him and he needs to be babysat by Charley’s niece, Rachel (which is secretly Sam’s healing scheme for both) is a hoot. Sam works renovating the museum, Charley researches, plans events, and fund-raises, and they fall quietly, gloriously in love, thanks to proximity, temperament, compatibility, and attraction.

In the end, however, Kearsley’s duo-narrated and narratived novel, despite its ghostly presences and characters caught in war, family strife (Charley’s own dad, like so many, left the US for Canada to protest going to the Vietnam War), and the realpolitik that every era brings, are people who want to live with integrity, love and be loved, build with their hands and hearts in sync their own small version of paradise. Kearsley’s book, as Charley notes, thinking how to market the museum, is a wonderful meta-romance, “The only thing people liked more than a ghost story was a good love story. This one was both”. Kearsley’s Bellewether is a superb ghost-and-love story!

Kearsley’s historical hand is loving and true, her understanding of how the past bears on the present doesn’t bog down her characters. She’s able to show them in their time and place, but she also lets them breathe, make choices of love and connection, without compromising duty. I loved that Kearsley’s characters, at least the ones I loved the most, have such integrity, never shirk place and responsibility, but still get their well-deserved HEAs. (And she only made me cry once, with the phrase, ” ‘Montreal has been taken. Vaudreuil has surrendered.’ “) We live with history’s legacies and are caught within its constraints, but, says Kearsley, with this her most hopeful, loving book, we don’t have to be trapped by it: forgiveness, love, loyalty, and integrity, goodness can light the way, can make it better. Miss Austen and I say that Bellewether is proof “there is no charm equal to tenderness of heart,” Emma.

Susanna Kearsley’s Bellewether is published by Simon and Schuster Canada. It was released on April 24 and may be found at your preferred vendors. I am grateful to Simon and Schuster for an e-ARC, via Netgalley.