The Sea Keeper's Daughters

There are many great Christian authors that tell stories and then there is Lisa Wingate who is a storyteller that weaves magical stories . I first started reading her last fall and have read everything she has written and am amazed how magical her stories are. They are real people with real struggles trying to find how to keep going in life.

This story follows Whitney Monroe who owns two restaurants in Michigan, one struggling to keep afloat, and a cousin running the other one. She finds that she has inherited  a decaying Gilded Age hotel on the Outer Banks.  She thinks she can go down there to clean the hotel out and sell it to hopefully fund her failing restaurant. One problem, Whitney's stepfather, who she is at odds with, is staying there and will not budge.  He is in failing health and she figures she can find a center to take care of him. Since this is a three story historic building, the downstairs tenants want to save the building and not see it sold. Whitney has her work cut out for her when she arrives.  She thinks she has it all figured out until as she is weeding stuff out and trying to figure out what is valuable and what is trash, she comes across an old necklace among letters that date back to the 1930's. As Whitney puts the letters together she realizes that there are family secrets and memories she wasn't prepared for. The letters are to her grandmother from her sister.  The sister, Alice, was hired by the WPA to chronicle the lives of people throughout the Blue Ridge Mountains. You learn about the cruelty and prejudice in the mountains and how it affected Alice.

Absolutely fascinating how she wove the past and present together to create a story I was sad to see end.  Wish she could have gone on and on with the story. When you read Lisa's stories you will be thoroughly entertained and hooked on her stories as I am.

Thanks to Tyndale Publishers for sending me a free copy just for my honest opinion.

 Lisa Wingate is a magazine columnist, speaker, and the author of nineteen mainstream novels, including the national bestseller, Tending Roses, now in its eighteenth printing.  She is a seven-time ACFW Carol award nominee, a Christy Award nominee, and a two-time Carol Award winner. Her novel, Blue Moon Bay, was a Booklist Top Ten of 2012 pick.  Recently, the group Americans for More Civility, a kindness watchdog organization, selected Lisa along with Bill Ford, Camille Cosby, and six others, as recipients of the National Civies Award, which celebrates public figures who work to promote greater kindness and civility in American life.  When not dreaming up stories, Lisa spends time on the road as a motivational speaker. Via internet, she shares with readers as far away as India, where her book, Tending Roses, has been used to promote women's literacy, and as close to home as Tulsa, Oklahoma, where the county library system has used Tending Roses to help volunteers teach adults to read.