Vacation Reads 2026
My husband and I spent two weeks in the UK recently, and we spent a lot of time on planes and trains, so I had a lot of time for reading.
When the World Fell Silent by Donna Jones Alward
The reason why I read this novel is because it is supposed to be about the Halifax harbour explosion that occurred during WWI when a French cargo ship that was carrying munitions was struck by another vessel and caught fire and exploded, flattening buildings and nearly obliterating the nearby community of Richmond. Nearly two thousand people died and thousands more were injured in the explosion. It’s wild that I didn’t even learn about this tragic piece of Canadian history until recently. Anyway, When the World Fell Silent misleads you into thinking it’s about the explosion when the explosion happens early in the novel and is over in a blip. The rest of the story is about an unmarried nurse who has to give up her job when she becomes pregnant and a war widow whose baby goes missing in the explosion. The funny thing is that the entire time I was reading this novel, I kept thinking I have read this novel before, even though I knew I hadn’t, and that is because the story is so goddamn predictable. This novel is a disappointing read. There has got to be a better story about the Halifax harbour explosion to spend your time on.
The Making of a Marchioness and The Shuttle by Frances Hodgson Burnett
I bought both of these novels from Persephone Books in Bath, England. Persephone Books publishes out-of-print novels by mainly women writers. I purchased The Making of a Marchioness first because I did not know that Frances Hodgson Burnett had also written adult novels and The Making of a Marchioness was her more popular adult novel. After I did some Googling, I decided to buy The Shuttle too because it sounded like the more interesting novel, and it is.
The Making of a Marchioness was written in two parts before both parts were combined into one novel. The first part is about a woman named Emily Fox-Seton who is of good birth but has no money and must earn a living; however, everyone admires Emily for her kindness. She attracts the attention of the Marquess of Walderhurst, who asks her to marry him. The second part is a melodrama involving the Marquess’s heir, Alec Osborn, who plots to murder Emily before she can give birth to the Marquess’s new heir. I would have liked The Making of a Marchioness better if there hadn’t been so much expounding on Emily’s kindness and if Emily hadn’t spent so much time expounding on the Marquess’s “goodness”. The guy only married Emily because she wasn’t clever enough to be annoying. The whole thing is a tiresome read.
The Shuttle is about the relationship between America and England through the lens of the “Dollar Princesses” who married impoverished English nobles. One such impoverished noble is Sir Nigel Anstruthers who travels to New York to find a rich heiress to marry. He ends up marrying the eldest daughter of an American millionaire, Rosalie Vanderpoel, and takes her back to England. Nigel is an abusive asshole who forces Rosalie to cut off contact with her family and bullies her into handing over her money before pissing off to Europe, leaving Rosalie and their child behind to live on a derelict estate.
Many years later, Rosalie’s younger sister, Bettina, decides to travel to England to find out what has happened to her sister. Now what I like about The Shuttle is rich people doing good things with their money to make life better for everyone. Bettina is like a fairy godmother with unlimited funds, breathing new life into her abused sister, her sister’s disabled child and the estate that Nigel refuses to be responsible for. Things get surprisingly dark when Nigel returns from Europe and becomes obsessed with Bettina. I thought the threat of sexual violence would be more oblique considering the time period in which Hodgson Burnett wrote this novel, but thankfully the novel has a happy, albeit predictable, ending.
What You Never Knew by Jessica Hamilton
I thought for sure What You Never Knew would be good because it has a ghost and a family secret waiting to be revealed, but this novel fell flat for me. It is about a woman named May Bennett who is dealing with her mother’s estate and is surprised to find out that she has inherited her family’s summer cottage on Avril Island, after her mother told her that she sold Avril Island decades earlier when May’s father disappeared. Immediately after finding out about this inheritance, May is killed in a car accident and she begins “haunting” her younger sister, June. June then learns about how their mother still owned Avril Island and decides to travel back to the island to see if she can figure out what happened to their father.
I was hoping What You Never Knew would be more suspenseful than it actually is, perhaps creepy with its setting on an abandoned island, but the story doesn’t lean very much into the spookiness of the setting. On top of that, I ended up not caring much for June because she is a lot like her mother, which turns out to not be a good thing, so I did not feel invested in what happened to her. It was also pretty easy to figure out all the secrets that June’s family was keeping from her so there were no shocking revelations.
So basically I ended up liking only one out of four of the novels I read, but at least I had a great vacation.
