The Vanished Days by Susanna Kearsley

Thanks to @netgalley and @bookmarked (Sourcebooks) for the ARC!

Y’all probably have noticed by now that we don’t read a lot of historicals. Just not our bag. I am 100% obsessed with Jamie Fraser, though, so go figure. Our friend, Nikki LOVES Susanna Kearsley though and during our pandemic book club, we read Bellewether.

Kearsley is a master at what I call the double helix story timeline. Both Bellewether and The Vanished Days (and from what I’ve heard, most of her novels) have two interlaced timelines that reflect back and forth on each other. Then, in addition to all that, most of her books interlink characters, events, locations. It’s just an incredible feat! And this book has A TWIST ENDING. In the afterward of The Vanished Days, she talks about how she was thinking this was going to be a very different book, but her research and the story guided it somewhere else. So: double helix timelines, multiple overlapping characters, surprise ending, AND SHE PANTS’ IT. Just incredible. (Pantsing: is a term for a way of writing that is the opposite of planning/plotting.)

I also do want to point out that this is probably more Historical Fiction, with a large dash of Romance, rather than Historical Romance.

The Vanished Days is about Lily a young girl growing up in Scotland at the end of the 17th and beginning of the 18th century as told by Seargeant Williamson, a man who was tasked with finding out if Lily was lying about her marriage. Not only do you learn about the saga of King James, William of Orange, and the battle between Christian religions in Scotland, but you also get to learn a little bit about their failed colonization of the Darien Gap, aka the Panama Canal.

If you are a sucker for Scots, history, or incredibly structured stories, this is a recommended read! - Ford