When You Loved Me by Beatriz Williams
Local history insists that a legendary pirate buried his treasure somewhere beneath Windward, the decayed Cooper estate on Winthrop Island, but Lucy Cooper never trusted the fable that broke her family apart. When a widowed Lucy returns with her young daughter to grieve her estranged father, she discovers the property’s buried under a mountain of debt, and Ben Ressler has just turned up on her doorstep.
Thirteen summers ago, a teenaged Lucy never meant to fall in love with Ben, a Dartmouth football star vacationing next door at the Peabody estate, and the object of an all-consuming crush by Laura Peabody, Lucy’s best friend. Those two weeks with Ben were the best and worst of Lucy’s life, dooming her friendship with Laura. Now Ben’s returned to live quietly in the Peabodys’ caretaker lodge, after a fatal accident ended his dazzling NFL career. He’s also the last person who saw Lucy’s father alive.
As Lucy reconstructs her father’s troubling final days, she uncovers his research on the frozen winter of 1717, when a desperately wounded pirate sought refuge on Winthrop Island with an enigmatic healer. To Lucy, this history points the way to a different kind of how to forgive yourself for the mistakes of the past and earn a second chance at love. But just as Lucy’s long-buried emotions sear to the surface, a shocking turn of events reveals that someone else on the island will do whatever it takes to claim the fabled plunder.
A timeless story of love and atonement, When You Loved Me maps both a centuries-old treasure hunt and the intimate territory of the human heart, weaving together past and present as only Beatriz Williams can.
Review: Thank you to Ballantine Books & NetGalley for an ARC of this book, which is out on June 23rd!
In this new novel, Lucy Cooper arrives back on Winthrop Island. Her partner is gone and now her father is also dead, and she has returned as a single mother to the somewhat delipidated estate on the island that is her inheritance. Her father spent his life trying to find the rumored pirate's treasure that is supposedly buried on the property. In the midst of all, Ben Ressler, a love from her past who is now an NFL player down on his luck is also in residence and reappears in her life. In an alternate timeline, we journey all the way back to 1717, in a terrible winter on the island, when a wounded pirate seeks refuge on the island.
This is the fourth book (I think) that Beatriz Williams has written set on Winthrop Island. I have read Under the Stars and Husbands & Lovers. While each is standalone, it is fun to see main characters from other novels pop up in supporting roles in this book. Williams seems to enjoy exploring the interconnected nature of communities across time. The island's past is still shaping its current time period and other characters from other stories have a role to play in the main characters of this story's lives. I appreciate how much depth and complexity this gives her novels.
I have to say I wasn't sure where this book was going at first and had to give it a while to develop. We are first on the football field during a bitterly cold game. Then we're on the island in present day time seeing Lucy and her young daughter. We're just settling in when, whoosh, we're whisked away to 1717! But as the novel got in a grove, I was more and more invested. I ultimately really loved the 1717 timeline and how Williams tied it to the present-day story and characters in the end.
While this doesn't feel like it should be characterized as a romance, it had such a great love story in this. I really loved Ben. He is so sure and steady and physically solid and comforting. This was a great second chance love story, where in some chapters we go back 12 years in time to meet Ben and Lucy as teenagers, when they were first falling in love and gradually learn what went wrong and what brought them to this moment in time. This also has some great elements of mystery and suspense: Lucy's father dies under somewhat mysterious circumstances; was it an accident? Is there really pirate's treasure on the island?
I ultimately really enjoyed this, but I did feel like it was a bit too long at almost 500 pages. And despite its length, I still felt like there were a lot of elements of the characters' lives that had been more fleshed out. I think this is a natural consequence of including a relatively large cast of characters and numerous timelines. It just felt a bit unwieldy at times. For instance, Lucy's mother is French and has had multiple children with multiple men and one is under investigation during this book. I wanted to know what ended up happening! I also wish we could've gotten more insight into the historical timeline because I was really invested in those characters, but less time was devoted to them.
This had some lovely lines and quotes in it. As a reader, I especially liked Lucy's description of her mother's reading style: "Maman is a promiscuous reader - Elin Hilderbrand wedged between Fanny Burney and Arundhati Roy, Dorothy Sayers stacked atop Philip Roth and a thick biography of Longfellow. The latest Ann Patchett stuck somewhere in the middle of the Aubrey-Maturin novels, out of order."
Also loved this quote: "Love means never having to say you're sorry. That was my dad's favorite line. He'd pause the movie and be like, totally unironic, See, kids? That's what love means. And you know what, Lucy? That is literally the worst line in the history of movies. It is the literal exact opposite of what love means."
Stars: 4
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