Ten-year-old orphan Virginia is adopted by the kindly Clement and the attractive Lorna Wrathmell. She arrives with Clem to their isolated house, called Salt Winds, placed near a dark, beautiful, and dangerous marsh. The year is 1940.

This story’s narration, however, doesn’t start here. It starts with Virginia Wrathmell at 85 years old, in 2015, returning to the house on the marsh to meet her death, or rather to kill herself on New Year’s Eve, in reparation for her big mistake in childhood.

A neighbor, Joe, looks after her, but she evades him, so she can accomplish what she came here for. While she walks around the seawall, Virginia finds the skull of a dead curlew. In her mind, this is significant as it portends and approves of Virginia’s stance.

Yet, before Virginia can put her plan into action, she sees a shivering teenage girl in thin clothes sitting on the seawall and crying. However unwillingly, she takes the girl into her house and takes care of her.

After this, through Virginia’s flashbacks we learn of what happened and how Virginia came to this point in her life. Saying more on the subject would be giving away the core plot, but by the end of the book one learns how Joe, this girl, and the setting have some link to the story, but the story is a lot more than these supporting characters. The real plot spotlights the characters of Clem, Lorna, Virginia, a neighbor Max Deering, and the German pilot Josef, and the marsh itself.

A few of the characters, mainly Virginia, Lorna, and their housekeeper were much better developed than the others, which is understandable. A couple of the good characters, such as Clem and Josef could be explored more deeply, but that would make the story too long and wouldn’t help its flow.

I was truly engrossed in this book because of the marsh’s foreboding dark Gothic presence in the lives of the characters and then, the plot’s pitting of the sociopath villain Deering against the other characters in a crafty way.

The themes of guilt, unhappy relationships, and revenge are explored masterfully in this story. The guilt and relationship problems are there outright, but the theme of revenge breaks the surface much later. Accordingly, when this reader thinks about it, Virginia’s decision of doing away with herself is also an act of revenge, as well as Virginia’s ploy directed against Deering’s offspring, even if the events prevented this second revenge, at the end.

I usually favor stories that are told straight out and do not revert to too much back and forth in chronology. On the other hand, this story’s narration, even If the switching between two eras of time seems to be overdone, did not take away any from the enjoyment of the story for me.

Above all, I enjoyed and appreciated the atmospheric quality and the sense of mystery in the telling of the story and the bleak, melancholic, and deadly existence of the setting that reminded me of the works of the Brontë sisters.

enjoying a good dark mystery that focuses on characters and their shortcomings rather than an event that a character in the story untangles.

the atmospheric quality of the story and how each thing and event tied with that quality.

is Elizabeth Brooks who grew up in Chester, England. She graduated from Cambridge University with a first-class degree in Classics.

this is the kind of story I like, but if you like happy endings and cheerful characters, this book isn't for you.

In this story, even if the ending isn't really happy, it shows some justification.

I also liked the telling of the story, the author's craft and how she knew what to tell and what to expose and when.

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Created Oct 19, 2019 at 2:27pm • Submit your own review...