The Vicar's Wife by Katherine Swartz Book Review

Description:

A powerful drama of domestic life following two memorable women who shared a house eighty years apart

A New Yorker all her life, Jane Hatton loved her job as the head of a charity championing women’s rights, but her fourteenyear- old daughter, Natalie, had fallen in with the wrong crowd at her Manhattan school. So Jane and her British husband, Andrew, have decided to move their family to the English countryside.
The Hattons have bought the large old vicarage in a small village on the Cumbrian coast, near Andrew’s new job. The silence and solitude of a remote village is quite a change. Natalie hates her new school, and eleven-year-old Ben struggles academically. Only seven-year-old Merrie enjoys country life. Has Jane made a horrible mistake? What of her career? Her own identity?
Putting on a brave face for the family, Jane tackles renovating the rambling, drafty old house. When she finds a scrap of a very old shopping list, she grows curious about Alice, the vicar’s wife who lived there years before.
As the twin narratives unfold—of Jane in the present and Alice in the 1930s—we discover that both are on a journey to discover their true selves, and to address their deepest fears.




About The Author;
 After spending her childhood in Canada and then three years as a diehard New Yorker, Katharine Swartz now lives in the Lake District with her husband, an Anglican minister, their five children, and a Golden Retriever. She enjoys such novel things as long country walks and chatting with people in the street, and her children love the freedom of village life – although she often has to ring four or five people to figure out where they’ve gone off to! She writes women’s fiction as well as contemporary romance for Mills & Boon Modern under the name Kate Hewitt, and whatever the genre she enjoys delivering a compelling and intensely emotional story. Find out more about her books at www.katharineswartz.com.



My review;
The Vicar's Wife is the tale of two women in different times who both find that they are actually stronger than they believe. The story goes back and forth from one woman's life to the other and you actually begin to think about how much the same they really are. Both are away from the home they knew and both are having a problem. They both are very unhappy and their unhappiness starts to affect their marriages. I found myself not wanting to wait to read the next chapter in the other's life. It seemed to me like a time travel story and those are my favorite. I give this book a 4/5. I was given this book by Kregel Publishers for the purpose of a review and all opinions are my own.