The Vicar's Wife by Katharine Swartz Review

The Vicar's Wife by Katharine Swartz

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 fourteen year- 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 Andrea'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 unfolds--of Jane in the present and Alice in the 1930's--we discover that both are on a journey to discover their true selves, and to address their deepest fears.

 

My Review:

I really liked this book. I love when old houses have old relics. Especially ones that let the present owner escape to a different time. It was interesting to read how both woman thought the same way and went through the same kind of issues, only about 80 years apart. I also thought that the book parallelled a third womans story. The author also left After spending three years as a diehard New Yorker, Katharine Swartz now lives in the Lake District with her husband, an Anglican minister. I am giving this book a 5/5. I was given a copy to review from Kregel, however all opinions are my own.