The Cliff House: One hen weekend, seven secrets… but only one worth killing for

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The Cliff House by RaeAnne Thayne was a beautiful story of three different women. Sisters Beatriz and Daisy, and their Aunt Stella, who is more like a young Mother to them after losing their own troubled Mom to a drug addiction many years before. Jarenlang weten de zusjes niet welke dromen Stella allemaal heeft opgegeven om voor hen te kunnen zorgen. Nu Daisy en Bea allebei volwassen zijn, is het tijd dat Stella het geheim onthult dat ze al die jaren verborgen heeft gehouden... I was particularly taken with Tamsyn's mother; the portrayal of her as a mother, a young widow, a woman who knew that her children were growing up and that she still had a life ahead of her was pitch perfect. In theory a hen party should be the chance for the bride to celebrate with all the people she loves around her, but the reality can be different. “Once I put them all in a room together I began to get to know how they would behave. Jen is soon to be married to Zaki and she has booked a very luxurious retreat for her hen weekend. She is joined at this remote Scottish island by a few friends from the tennis club (Nicolette and Kennedy), two of her oldest friends (Helena and Michelle), her soon to be sister-in-law Samira and Beattie, the sister-in-law of her first marriage to Jason.

Tamsyn watches The Cliff House through her binoculars and fantasises about the people who live there and is desparate to get more of an insight into their perfect lives. He read adult fiction and devoured Tolkien, Douglas Adams and Ian Fleming’s books– “young adult fiction hadn’t been invented yet,” he points out. Agatha Christie found And Then There Were None, her story of 10 strangers invited to an island off the Devon coast, her hardest book to write. “I knew better than any critic how difficult it had been,” she wrote in her autobiography. But Christie’s struggles failed to put off future crime writers: from PD James’s The Lighthouse to, more recently, Lucy Foley’s The Guest List, the charms of a closed, dangerous setting, where everyone is a suspect, are just too tempting for mystery novelists. Daisy is an uptight CPA with a secret who controls everything in her life after a traumatic experience as a child in foster care. When a free-spirited man comes into her life and discovers what she is hiding, she must decide whether to finally open up to love. Dozens of ships have run aground on the southern shore of the Golden Gate below the Cliff House. [4] First Cliff House (1863–1894) [ edit ] First Cliff House, c. 1868 James Malcolm Wilkins, proprietor

Who can you trust in The Cliff House?

I have read and enjoyed a few RaeAnne Thayne books and was eager to dive into The Cliff House when I heard there was a new standalone for me to jump into. Although I have given this one a three-star rating, know I had a big debate with this one. A part of me wanted to round my three-point-five-star rating up, and I almost did, but the part of me that compared it to my other RaeAnne Thayne reads had me rounding down. The story is set in the 1980’s Tamsyn lives in a small Cornish cottage with her mother, her brother Jago and her grandfather. Her father died 6 years previously drowned off the Cornish coast when Tamsyn was 10 and she hasn’t quite got over it. She is a loner at school and quite timid for her age. She spends her days up on the cliff path with her binoculars watching the residence of the The Cliff House and sometimes her mother who works part time there as a cleaner. The Davenports only come to the cliff house at weekends. So, during the week Tamsyn without her mother knowing takes the key and secretly swims in the pool at the cliff house. When one day while swimming Tamsyn hears a noise only to be confronted by the Davenports daughter Edie and they soon start up a friendship, to the distaste of her mother. Angela believes that things are not going to turn out well. The Cliff House is perfect if you are looking for a book with sweet romance, sisterhood, and complex family dynamics. It also does a great job talking about foster care- with both positive and negative portrayals and discussions of the real need for good foster parents. Daisy is also overwhelmed since Cruz brought the man who saved his life to Cape Sanctuary with him. Apparently, the gorgeous man who tried to talk to her in the toothpaste aisle at the grocery needs to heal his injury. Gorgeous men don’t try to talk to plain Daisy, ever. Now he’s everywhere she looks, and he seems to know her like no one else can, or should. Will his questions make her run and hide, or will she finally confide in him?

The Cliff House was my first book by RaeAnne Thayne, and I would read another book from her any day of the week. The way she wove together three separate romances was very well done. sunbathing on the cliff top. We are also conscious that not everyone loves dogs as much as we do, so we The strength of this novel is in the three main female characters, none of which is stronger or more important than the others. Their well-written stories are woven together seamlessly. While it is predictable that HEAs will be involved, it is not predictable how and when they will get there. Being isolated from friends during the pandemic that led to me thinking about the family of friendship and different levels of friendship. a b c Christine Miller, "Cliff House Disasters", GGNRA ParkNews, Fall 2002, via Outside Lands, October 4, 2002.Wallace Stegner refers to the Cliff House in his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Angle of Repose in a letter from Susan Ward to her friend Augusta, in which she describes a visit to San Francisco in 1867 (1971). [24] This is a solid women's fiction story. I've only read RaeAnne Thayne's romances before this one, and I adore them so much. The Cliff house was also good but I wish I had more from pretty much every character. There are multiple POV's, particularly Aunt Stella and her two nieces Bea and Daisy, and each one of these characters had a romance story. They were all good, but I wouldn't have minded a deeper dive into these relationships. Cliff House reopens despite government shutdown (again), with federal permission, Inside Scoop SF, October 12, 2013 Wrench, Kirk. "Cliff House". National Park Service. United States Department of the Interior . Retrieved July 30, 2020.

Daisy Davenport McClure is the older of the girls and has always felt it her responsibility to take care of her younger sister Bea. Daisy has a secret that she has kept from her family for a while now. Will she ever be able to come clean about her big secret? Daisy is a very quiet and reserved person. When Daisy meets the man who is responsible for saving her ex-brother-in-laws life, she knows that there is something about him, but will Daisy let herself get involved with someone she doesn't really know? a b Gafni, Matthias (December 14, 2020). "S.F.'s iconic Cliff House restaurant to shut down". San Francisco Chronicle . Retrieved 14 December 2020. I loved how the story of three women and their journeys were realized. As a younger reader (late teens and early twenties) I often by passed women’s fiction or books like this, mostly because I didn’t feel like I could relate to the characters. Now as an adult in my late thirties, I can totally relate to many of these characters and their journey’s and can appreciate it more than I ever could as a younger woman. After the death of their mother, Beatriz (Bea) and Daisy spent some time in foster care before being raised by their Aunt Stella. Raising her two nieces at a young age, inspired Stella to go on and be a foster parent and start an organization to raise money for children and families in the foster care system.Tamsyn is frighteningly out of her depth and vulnerable and the dynamics of her friendship with Edie has a sinister undertone as she is drawn into a family just as fractured as her own but in far more dangerous ways. Tamsyn’s mother, Angie, cleans at The Cliff House and knows the Davenports’ world is a very different one to their own and there is something worrying off about Eleanor Davenport. As Tamsyn fixates on The Cliff House and is blind to the signs which suggest something is amiss the writing exudes an uncomfortable sense of foreboding. When Jago too finds employment alongside Angie at the house and the fallout ensues it has unimaginable repercussions that devastatingly alter everything for both families. The drawing of that friendship is beautifully balanced, and I found that I could emphasise with each girl. Tamsyn is still grieving for her father and she is unhappy that her mother's friendship with a local man might become a romance; while Edie is burdened by a family situation that she is unable to talk about. The whole world of this book is beautifully evoked. I can't quite place the Cliff House, but I can believe in two girls a few years younger than me, in everything that happened around them, in the whole story that played out just a few miles away from me.