Sea of Lost Love

January 7, 2008
A young woman finds love and sudden maturity in this charmingly melodramatic romance from the author of The Gypsy Madonna
. Tragedy strikes an upper-class English family at its Cornish manor house in 1958: Robert “Monty” Montague has vanished, leaving behind a pile of debts, a pair of shoes washed up on the beach, a drifting motorboat bearing his gold pocket watch and a note in a bottle that reads, “Forgive me.” His spoiled daughter, the impossibly beautiful 21-year-old Celestria, is forced out of her shallow complacency to discover why her father, whom everyone loved and assumed to be so happy, apparently drowned himself. She follows a trail of bank statements to a seaside Italian convent converted into a family-run hotel. There, she encounters Hamish McCloud, a surly Scotsman who loathed Monty and, after a rocky start, develops a very different feeling toward Celestria. The prose is florid and fitting for the ridiculously, deliciously escapist whirlwind romance that envelopes Celestria and Hamish as the over-the-top revelations about Monty come to light.

April 15, 2008
At one point in Montefiore's latest work (after "The Gypsy Madonna"), a character is reading John Galsworthy's "The Forsyte Saga", a fitting choice given the parallels the author is providing in her sometimes melodramatic but very readable novel. Beautiful 21-year-old Celestria Montague leads a charmed life in 1958. She's beloved by her respected, well-to-do family. Spending the summer at Pendrift, the ancestral manse in Cornwall, England, Celestria is concerned only with overcoming boredom and dancing the night away at the annual ball. Then her equally charmed and charming father, Robert "Monty" Montague, disappears off the Cornish coast, leaving just a note that says, "Forgive me." While the family reels from the apparent suicide, spoiled Celestria doesn't believe it. As she follows clues left by Monty to a converted convent in Italy, she learns that her father had many secrets, each one darker than the next. Along the way, she falls in love and grows up. Though Montefiore's writing is uneven, her novel will appeal to fans of Maeve Binchy.Jane Jorgenson, Madison P.L., WI

Copyright 2008 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

March 1, 2008
Set in 1958 England, Montefiores novel follows the fortunes of the Montagues, a wealthy English family with an estate in Cornwall. The extended family meets for idyllic summers at the estate, but their perfect world is shattered when Robert Montague drowns in what appears to be a suicide. His beautiful, vain 21-year-old daughter, Celestria, is as shocked as the rest of the family but is unwilling to simply accept his death and move on. Instead, she begins to go through his papers and is surprised to discover that he was sending the family fortune to a lawyer in the small Italian town of Puglia. Celestria takes off for Italy, where she learns her father was keeping more than a few secrets from his family. Celestria finds more than she bargained for in the form of an angry widower who seems to hate her for no reason. Readers who enjoy family drama, romance, and mystery will find it all in this lush and absorbing novel.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2008, American Library Association.)