The Last Song of Winter
May. 30th, 2025 01:26 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alobearI picked up this book in a charity shop because I remembered the author's name - Lulu Taylor - and having enjoyed another couple of her books before.
This one is a narrative split between Veronica in the 1940s and Romy in the 'present day' (the book was published in 2024. Veronica's story is about musical theatre, Parisian high society, secret relationships, obsessive love - and a house on a Welsh island full of birds. Romy's goes to the island to research a book about Veronica, but ends up having her own unlikely adventures, torn between two men she meets who may or may not be hiding things of their own.
It's well written and compelling - though, by the halfway point, I really wasn't sure where it was going because there wasn't a particularly strong throughline to either narrative thread. And, sure enough, the massive melodrama at the end of both storylines came pretty much out of nowhere and wasn't really connected to much of the rest of what happened in the book.
Still, I was engaged throughout and it kept me guessing until the end - though there were a couple of quite ridiculous coincidences used to push the plot forwards at certain points.
The exploration of Romy's struggles with her mental health was largely well done, and I liked both female protagonists.
Lulu Taylor does know how to tell a yarn (even if it did have me rolling my eyes a few times) and I'll definitely pick up more of her books if I come across them.
This one is a narrative split between Veronica in the 1940s and Romy in the 'present day' (the book was published in 2024. Veronica's story is about musical theatre, Parisian high society, secret relationships, obsessive love - and a house on a Welsh island full of birds. Romy's goes to the island to research a book about Veronica, but ends up having her own unlikely adventures, torn between two men she meets who may or may not be hiding things of their own.
It's well written and compelling - though, by the halfway point, I really wasn't sure where it was going because there wasn't a particularly strong throughline to either narrative thread. And, sure enough, the massive melodrama at the end of both storylines came pretty much out of nowhere and wasn't really connected to much of the rest of what happened in the book.
Still, I was engaged throughout and it kept me guessing until the end - though there were a couple of quite ridiculous coincidences used to push the plot forwards at certain points.
The exploration of Romy's struggles with her mental health was largely well done, and I liked both female protagonists.
Lulu Taylor does know how to tell a yarn (even if it did have me rolling my eyes a few times) and I'll definitely pick up more of her books if I come across them.
