Book Review-Blackberry Winter

Before I start this review, I have to confess....Sarah Jio is one of my favorite authors. Whenever I hear about a new book she's writing, I get giddy! If I ever become an author, I'd want my style to mirror hers. Enough gushing! On to the review...

Plume, $15.00

Blackberry Winter is a story of two women, in two different eras (one in 1933 and one in the present day), whose lives strangely parallel as the result of a blackberry winter (a late-spring snow storm) in Seattle. Vera's son goes missing during the 1933 storm. She searches high and low for him and resorts to desperate measures to find him, leading to a terribly tragic outcome. In the present day, journalist Claire Aldridge stumbles upon the story of the 1933 missing boy when Seattle experiences another blackberry winter. She is determined to solve the mystery by delving deep into the past and getting over her own tragic hurdles.

This book is incredibly engaging, as are all of Sarah's novels. The fact that she weaves mystery in with romance makes her books incredibly appealing, especially to my demographic. She is so engaging, in fact, that I almost wanted to stop reading. I didn't want to think of the terrible things that could have happened to Vera's son or to Claire to make her so emotionally detached. This shows how involved the reader is in the characters' emotions.

I most definitely recommend picking up Blackberry Winter and staying tuned to Sarah's next book, The Last Camellia due out next May. And if you want to check out her first novel, The Violets of March, it was my favorite book of all time!