I’m currently reading The Art of Inheriting Secrets by Barbara O’Neal. It’s a story of a food writer drawn by grief and the discovery of her mother’s secret life to visit the manor house she grew up in. Even though the roof has fallen in and plants are growing in the once grand rooms, Olivia Shaw feels a responsibility to take what has been forgotten and make it beautiful again.
O’Neal’s Beautiful writing is a joy to read and her story pulls me in and along. But the thing that puts this story right in my sweet spot, is it’s about an heiress who wants to discover the treasures of her family history as she restores the neglected grand country manor house, inherited from her artist mother.
As she learns the lost art of being a Countess, she discovers that the world her mother painted, again and again, is real and not imagined. The once beautiful gardens can be identified although now overgrown and gone wild. In the process of restoring the Manor house, she hopes to unearth secrets buried and the reason her mother walked away from it all.
Having recently lost her mother, Olivia is grieving and trying to start a new life without the woman who’s been with her through all her years. She’d grown up in America, ignorant of her mother’s English title and heritage and embarks on this journey in an attempt to keep her close by discovering her heritage.
Olivia has a helper in the form of Samir, a kind man who also would like to see the Manor restored. Not only is her mother’s passing calling Olivia to look back but also to look forward. Her friendship with Samir puts her old relationship into perspective but Samir is younger than her so she fights the feelings that are drawing her to him.
This book is a real treasure. I can't resist sharing a passage with you.
Our approach this time was from the rear. The house appeared as we turned the corner. Under the low clouds, it shone bright gold and looked considerably less tattered than it had yesterday from the taxi. I recognized the roofline, the trees marching away from the rise from my mother’s paintings. I thought of her, all these years, painting the place she’d left long ago, and it made me ache a little.
I can feel the tug of wanting to fix up an old home as I read this book. But I've already had to do a complete renovation of the home I live in with Sam, so I’m fully aware it’s not all exciting and fun but mainly a lot of work and more hard decisions than you can imagine. The old kitchen cupboards would have been expensive in their day and had cottage charm but were too short and ill-configured for me to keep them. I still feel a little sad about replacing them.
But the neglected house we bought has come back to life and is loved again. I suppose renewal is what life is all about. Some things have to be let go of in order to embrace the future. But the past has its gifts, like centuries-old art, there is a beauty that is timeless. Not everything should be held on to, there needs to be room for growth, innovation, and creativity but knowing what came before can help so much in what we create for the future.
1 comment:
Beautiful!
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