The Sound of Glass by Karen White
Book Club read on Audible
Book Description
The New York Times bestselling author of A Long Time Gone now explores a Southern family’s buried history, which will change the life of the woman who unearths it, secret by shattering secret.
It has been two years since the death of Merritt Heyward’s husband, Cal, when she receives unexpected news—Cal’s family home in Beaufort, South Carolina, bequeathed by Cal’s reclusive grandmother, now belongs to Merritt.
Charting the course of an uncertain life—and feeling guilt from her husband’s tragic death—Merritt travels from her home in Maine to Beaufort, where the secrets of Cal’s unspoken-of past reside among the bluff mud and jasmine of the ancestral Heyward home on the Bluff. This unknown legacy, now Merritt’s, will change and define her as she navigates her new life—a new life complicated by the arrival of her too young stepmother and ten-year-old half-brother.
Soon, in this house of strangers, Merritt is forced into unraveling the Heyward family past as she faces her own fears and finds the healing she needs in the salt air of the Low Country.
My thoughts
This was my fault. I misread the book description. I was hoping for a moody, atmospheric thriller with maybe a ghost or a family curse, a brooding and dangerous love interest, and a decaying mansion at the center of it all. I got the decaying house, complete with a secret in the attic, but I also got a bratty main character who justified her ride behavior because of past trauma. Girl, get a therapist. You’re an adult in your thirties.
I’m the one who picked this for book club and I can only hope they enjoyed it more than I did. I also want to note that the audio version was fine. I probably wouldn’t have finished it if I had been reading it. Crossing this author off my list for the future.
Trigger Warning for physical and emotional abuse, plane crash, and death. (The last chapters were pretty upsetting for me.)
Speedy Reader 