I'm on a Book Review Roll

Riverton's Past Revealed

This is one book I bought specifically because of all the five star reviews at Amazon.com. Sometimes I buy books based on the old cliche "because of the cover" and sometimes I buy them because I'm familiar with the author. And then there's those times I'll buy them because so many other readers have recommended them to me. But then every once in awhile, I'll come upon a book I've never heard of and don't think the cover is all that interesting yet it has all great reviews on Amazon. Such was the case with The House At Riverton. I was intrigued and that was enough for me.

One hundred pages in, I went back to read all of the reviews again just to make sure I had purchased the right book because, at that point, it wasn't grabbing me. I had just finished watching a few Netflix BBC series all set in the early twenties so I felt my recent connection with this era would surely make me feel right at home at Riverton. Such was not the case. While it had all of the requisite elements of a good Gothic story set in Edwardian times.....the old manor house, its wealthy inhabitants, servants who gossip, secrets revealed, the challenge of female emancipation, the war and its sacrificial lambs and the never-ending desire to escape one's past....for some stange reason it just did not resonate with me.

I do enjoy novels where an elderly person is reliving their past and the book floats between two places in time. While this book did this seamlessly, I just never really felt invested enough to care about the residents at Riverton or even to care about the mystery involved therein.

Grace is the elderly woman in question, once a lady's maid at the esteemed house and now forced to relive her past as a result of a movie being made of an apparent suicide at the same great house. During the course of her many years of service, she had seen enough and heard enough to last a lifetime. She had also been asked to keep many secrets, many of which she'll take to her grave. Or so it would seem until she begins her life "on tape" to be given to her grandson. There is one secret here that I wish the author would have expanded upon and it might have given me reason to add another star to this review. But the secret is left out there without the reader being able to witness what it would have meant to the person involved had they known its truth. I would have to say the last third of the book is much better than the beginning. It's at this point many of the secrets are revealed but, by that time, this reader was just counting the pages until I was done with it.

So suffice it to say I'm in total disagreement with most of the other reviews of this book and that's why I say every book has its day and this day wasn't the day for this book for me.