Merrin Mercy Kellow is the main character in this book, but there are some fab other characters too. Merrin’s sister Ruby, her best friend Bella, her first boyfriend Jarvis and also her parents. They live in Cornwall and having spent a lot of lovely holidays there I really enjoyed the setting. Amanda is so descriptive that you can imagine looking out to sea and feeling the sand between your toes. Where do I start? Merrin is a beautiful character, full of hope, romance and life. It broke my heart to read how she crumbled, along with all her dreams, on that fateful day. This is the story of Merrin, a girl like you & me..a girl next door 🚪..I related to her at so many aspects.. Set in the small fishing village of Port Charles in Cornwall, this is the story of Merrin (Merry) Kellow, whose family founded the village generations before. She lives with her parents Ben and Heather, her older sister Ruby, and their Gran Ellen. Her best friend Bella, who I would love to have as a friend of my own, lives just down the path. Everyone knows everyone, and Merrin has always imagined her future as a wife and mother in this place. At 19, when she falls in love with the wealthy Digby Mortimer, she envisions her future raising children in the Mortimer mansion overlooking the village. Beautiful descriptions of Cornwall. Something different from the city/ small town descriptions I usually read.

And feeling that she was never going to find anything close to the love she had felt at the time, the story grows, showing how she hardens her heart to feelings too intense, pushing away so many people who love her, romantically, and otherwise.

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The wisdom imparted in this book is something I never want to forget. All of us have been quoted little sayings and quips from our parents and Grandparents. With this family being from Cornwall, they have some unique words of wisdom.

This is a remarkable story of family love and of a small town. Scandals, rumors and a wedding that didn't happen. It is about forgiveness and letting go, about learning to live and love after your heat has been broken and you have been humiliated and devastated by one that you loved and trusted with all your heart. It is a story of returning home to a family and a town that loves you as much as you love it. We love places. We can easily attach to a place with particular meaning to us. Whether because of our history in that location or our aesthetic response to it. The field of environmental psychology explores this love. Some scholars have even argued that we imprint onto the geography where we are born and are forever attracted to a similar landscape. In a more limited way, people can create a home that they love and ensure that it helps them access nourishment for body and soul. It hasn’t been easy, but six years later Merrin has forged a new life for herself. But when tragedy strikes, she has no choice but to return to the village she swore she’d never set foot in again. And she is forced to relook at the questions that she has been avoiding for all those years.

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Amanda Prowse sets this novel in a fishing village in Cornwall, and a market town close to Bristol. The fishing families are close knit, with the novel concentrating on two of these families, the Kellows and the Cardys who live in fishing cottages, and the Mortimers who are a wealthy biscuit factory family who live in a Palladian Clifton home. With its size, gardens, employment of staff and education of the son of the house, the Mortimers are established as different from the village people who are largely fishers, and shopkeepers. I had a hard time empathizing with Merrin, not because I didn't understand her, but on the contrary. She has a cheerful, sweet and even a little wild character. She has a great capacity to forgive and give second chances to others. But she is incapable of forgiving or loving herself. She is a complex and unpredictable character who leaves us unforgettable moments of reading. Merrin is eagerly looking forward to her wedding and marrying Digby. But, on the day, she’s left jilted as he doesn’t show. Not wanting to be in the town where everyone is talking about her, she moves away, from the lovely village she grew up in and her family to start a new life. She’s thriving in the job she’s doing, and meets someone, but she feels it’s not the same as what she had before. Hurt and demoralized by the well-meaning village gossip, Merrin does the unthinkable and flees her home. The process by which we take in and use the attachment we have received in becoming a loved person is called internalization.”