Title: White Sand, Blue Sea
Author: Anita Hughes
Date finished: 5/2/17
Genre: Fiction, women’s fiction
Publisher: St. Martin’s Griffin
Publication Date: April 11, 2017
Pages in book: 289
Stand alone or series: Stand alone I think, its hard to tell from the website if the other books are connected
Where I got the book from: NetGalley NOTE: I received this book for free from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. This in no way affected my opinion of the book, or the content of my review.
Blurb from the cover:
Olivia Miller is standing on the porch of her mother and stepfather’s plantation style villa in St. Barts. They have been coming here every April for years but she is always thrilled to see the horseshoe shaped bay of Gustavia and white sand of Gouverneur’s Beach. This trip should be particularly exciting because she is celebrating her twenty-fifth birthday and hoping that Finn, her boyfriend of four years, will propose.
The only person who won’t be here is her father, Sebastian, whom she hasn’t seen in twenty years. He’s a well-known artist and crisscrosses the globe, painting and living in exotic locations like Kenya and China. When Sebastian unexpectedly walks through the door and floats back into Olivia’s life like a piece of bad driftwood she never knew she wanted, she starts to wonder if her world is too narrow. She questions the dreams and the relationship she’s always thought she wanted. But there seems to be more to the story than an innocent fatherly visit, and Olivia must decide if love is more important than truth.
Set on St. Barts, the jewel of the Caribbean, Anita Hughes’s WHITE SAND, BLUE SEA is a heartwarming story about romance and adventure, and most important, about knowing yourself, and what makes you happy.
My rating: 1.25 stars out of a scale of 5
My review: I was provided a free copy of this book in exchange for an honest and fair review. This book tells the story of Olivia Miller and her family during Olivia’s birthday week vacation at her step-father’s home on St. Bart’s. Olivia is soon to turn 25 and she has been waiting for 20 years for her biological father to come to one of her birthday parties. So when he turns up at the door about 4 days before her birthday, she is ecstatic. Sebastian is a charmer and in no time has everyone eating out of the pal, of his hand. But is there really room in Olivia’s life for someone like Sebastian after all these years?
Overall I didn’t care for this book. I found the characters to be flat and emotionless and unrealistic. After 20 years of not seeing her father, Olivia is overjoyed to have him show up? I find it hard to believe that she wouldn’t have been a little more angry at him. And the “arguments” in the book as well as most of the conversation felt forced and unbelievable. The narratives would jump from flashbacks to present tense with almost no transitions, which made it really confusing to read. I didn’t really like or connect with any of the characters. There didn’t seem to really be a particular plot and most of the narratives about flashbacks didn’t add any value to the story line and seemed irrelevant.
The bottom line: I really didn’t care for this book.
Click on the cover to go to the book’s Amazon page
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