Johnson is a great storyteller, very natural and engrossing, and I enjoyed the setup of her parallel adventure/discovery stories. Unfortunately I had gripes about the main character's personality / choices, and it made it hard to be invested in her emotional journey. Ditto for basically everyone she knew in England. The callous disregard they have for each other and for themselves really drives the story, but is that how we want the story to be driven? The past storyline also has a lot of questionable "well, love means you can ignore your beloved's choices, or behave badly to the perfectly nice people in your world" stuff. It's a shame there was sooo much of that in so many relationships, both past and present, because it brought what could have been a really interesting transportive tale about beauty and self-determinism down. Julia get's dumped by her best friend's husband, who she's been having an affair with for years, and receives an antique embroidery pattern book as a parting gift. Written in the spaces is the diary of a young woman, Catherine, who was abducted from Cornwall by Moroccan pirates and sold into slavery 400 years before. The story then jumps back and forth between story lines as Julia tries to get over her recent break up and figure out what had happened to the young woman and how the book made it back to england. The first few chapters were kinda boring but it picked up after that.
Do You like book Crossed Bones (2008)?
Starts a little slow ... but then pirates! Enough said.
—NqkfoNikfo
Nice blend of two cultures and two time periods
—BookWorm
