The Winter Sea

The Winter Sea
By Susanna Kearsley (527 pages)
Published by Sourcebooks, Inc.
Bookish rating: 4

The Winter Sea is a quasi-historical novel, jumping between 18th-century Scotland and the Jacobites aiming to restore King James to the throne, and current-day drama in the same place--a castle, Slains, on the Scotland coast where an author, Carrie, researches her next novel. As she dwells near Slains, she finds herself writing her novel as though she has her heroine's memories.

Kearsley gives an absorbing sense of time (both time periods, that is) and place, and you can just hear the cadence of a Scottish accent (and not just from the SUPER Scottish folk) in her writing and dialogue.

The drama is broad and sweeping, and the romance avoids total cheese. Plots twists genuinely surprised me, and the last quarter of the book was particularly well done.

Not a perfect novel, though: Carrie's voice was a tad generic for me, and there were A LOT of information dumps, where modern-day historians and experts just "dumped" massive amounts of history and context on the reader, in the guise dialogue and conversation. Kearsley could've gotten away with some of this and flown under the heavy sigh radar, but it happen so often that I got kind of annoyed. These information dumps also made it difficult to stay connected to the story and determine which historical details I needed to remember.

But a very good, read-by-the-fire sort of book. This was my first Susanna Kearsley novel, and I plan to read others. Recommended.