Pick Up Butterfly Palace (Love Across The Sea #1) Picturized By Colleen Coble Offered In Digital Copy
had no trouble putting this book down, I like my suspense/mysteries to be deep, I found this a shallow read, I kept wanting to be sucked into the plot but it kept jumping around and flinging me away, It's hard to describe the difficulty I had with it, I had the "bad guys" figured out halfway through the book,
This is not a "Christian" fiction book as there is really nothing that speaks to Christianity except a few allusions to praying, Nothing speaks of the heart, It seems like the new requirements for Christian fiction is the obligatorypages of sex as in secular books, I'm not quite sure why this trend is, but this author got hers in, It was a good read, One thing I love about being a blogger is getting to check out all the latest books from my favourite authors without having to put out cash : I received the copy of Colleen Coble's Butterfly Palace from BookSneeze.
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Butterfly Palace is a book full of intrigue, romance, and murder mystery, The book description says:
Elegance and wealth, Privilege and politics. The extravagance of the Butterfly Palace overwhelmed Lilys senses and nearly smothered her painful memories, She pushed away her misgivings, . . She was perfectly safe in this huge house,
Austin, Texas: Abandoned by the love of her life and still mourning the loss of her mother, Lily Donaldson has turned her back on the pain and come to Austin for a fresh start, working for the Marshall family as a kitchen maid in their luxurious mansion, the Butterfly Palace.
The tasks before her are legion, and her mistress less than pleasant, but at least Lilys new life will be, if nothing else, distracting,
But one night, while serving at a dinner party, Lily recognizes the man who abandoned her, Andy, her liaison from the livery stable, the blacksmiths son, . . sitting among the distinguished guests, Though he recognizes her, Andy does not acknowledge her aloud, and Lily is left reeling, flabbergasted, and irate,
But before she can get an explanation, the path of the Servant Girl Killer swerves very close to the Butterfly Palace, sowing terror among the maids, Having come to Austin to start anew, Lily suddenly feels trapped in a spider web, How can she know who to trust in a house where lies come dressed in fine suits and deceit in silk gowns the colors of butterfly wings
Sometimes along the way life can get really interesting and really complicated.
I think we have all experienced a little bit of Lily's feelings of constant struggle with no time to just rest and be at piece,
Lily is a girl who has fallen on some very rough times, and when she thinks things are about to pick up and get better for her, she realizes she is wrong.
First she runs into her former love, who ran off on her without a word, but then there is a servant girl killer on the loose, and she just got hired on as a new servant girl.
Lily finds herself being blamed for every good or bad thing that goes on around her, She starts to question why God is letting all these happen to her, I think its something we can all relate to,
One of the reasons I like Colleen Coble's books is that even when you think you have it all figured out as to what will happen, there is a twist you weren't ready for.
Butterfly Palace is a great book with tons of mystery and intrigue, Whenever I thought I had it figured out I was lead down a different path,
I recommend this book, especially if you are a fan of Colleen Coble's, I found this book to be a pretty quick read, It took meday. Romantic suspense author Colleen Coble has done it again! Filled with lots of mystery and suspense along with a light dose of romance, this Downton Abbeylike novel is sure to delight and impress, keeping you up late into the night!
This is the third novel I've read by Colleen Coble, and for sure my favorite of the three.
The first two were Tidewater Inn and Rosemary Cottage, I was completely blown away with this novel, since the other books I'd read by her weren't as good as this novel, in my opinion, and I absolutely loved every singe page of this novel! I remember just finishing the first chapter and thinking to myself that I already knew that without a doubt I'd have this book on my favorites list.
In fact, I loved it so much, I'm putting it on my top three favorite reads of!
If you enjoy historical fiction set in the's, placed in an elaborate Texas mansion, complete with the inside look at the everyday life of the servants who keep the house functioning this book reminded me a lot of the beloved T.
V. series Downton Abbey mixed with a health dose of mystery and edgeofyourseat suspense, then you absolutely must read this novel!
I just loved this setting! I mean being a proud Texan, I was already excited how the book is set in Austin Texas, and to find that it was set in a huge mansion that reminded me a lot of Downton Abbey, then I knew I'd enjoy it.
This novel was everything I was hoping for based on reading the synopsis, and then some! The suspense in this novel really surprised me, I knew Colleen mainly wrote suspense novels, but this one was a masterpiece! I loved how she combined the time period and setting with the mystery, and found it to be a very interesting suspense, filled with lots of historical details.
Another thing I noticed was how well thought out the plot was, There were constant twists and turns in the story that left me on the edge of my seat and reevaluation who I assumed was behind the dangerous undercover work, It was obvious with how smoothly the story flowed that the author thought out the plot very well, and it definitely showed!
While I do highly recommend this book to historical suspense fans, I will say that due to some mature content, I would only recommend this book to mature readers.
Mature content included a scene where a couples' kissing lead went too far and resulted in an alluded love scene whilst in a barn alone, While not many details were given of the event, the idea that they were involved in an inappropriate love scene was obviously alluded to, though not obviously stated, I felt like the romance scenes were a little overly mushy, and ended up skipping most of the kissing scenes as there was a bit more passion than I cared to read.
There were also several scenes involving a murderer, and while again not many details were given, there were a few details on how the victim's necks were slit, as well as a scene were a body was found.
While the author did handle these scenes without giving overly gory details, younger readers will still want to take caution when reading,
D I S C L A I M E R :: I received a free copy of Butterfly Palace from the publisher for the purpose of this review, I was not paid to write this review, and all thoughts expressed in my review are completely unbiased and honest, Wow! This book totally took me by surprise, I started this book without much hope for it,but it totally surprised me! I enjoyed the mystery and suspense, I think Belle was my favorite,.Though I did find the mystery interesting and wellplotted it took a variety of twists and turns that I honestly didn't see coming there were a few things that did bother me.
It was mostly the romance between Lilly and Drew it is stated that in their past they did not keep their relationship pure, and although by the time they meet again both of them regret their past mistakes, there's still an awful lot of kissing involved.
The uncomfortable, mushy kind I didn't find it difficult to skip those parts, and there was certainly more to the story than that, But still, it was a disappointment,
One of my favorite aspects of the book was Lilly's mistress, Belle, who starts out as an incredibly dislikable character, . . until later in the book when she begins to change, Normally characters like that don't change and are just the onedimensional, spoiled and annoying rich girls who exist only to make life harder for the heroine, and though Belle started out that way, by the end of the book she was one of my favorite characters because she was interesting.
In the end, though I wasn't amazed with this book, and found some of the content that continued to pop up rather annoying, I do give it points for having a detailed mystery and few intriguing characters.
I received this book for free from booksneeze, com in exchange for my honest review,.
I have mixed feelings about the book, For secular fiction, I'd have praised the moral points, of how a hero and heroine attempt to leave behind their former sinful relations with each other for Christian fiction, I really didn't like scenes where the hero goes from reading his Bible one minute and trying very hard not to lust for the heroine the next.
This would have worked a lot better for me if it had been Fiction rather than Christian fiction, Really, there's no reason it shouldn't be, other than who it's published by, The religion is no more than is to be expected from the culture of the day,
The plot was worthy of a much more epic book, There's tons of intricacy to what goes on, but the city itself is rather shadowy, Other than a few references to "big city", "unaccustomed noise", etc, there wasn't much attention paid to the scene of town, So much so that other reviewers, unfamiliar with the history of Texas and Austin, have come to the rather humorous idea that the story takes place in a "small village".
I think Coble took for granted that most of her readers might have had a highschoollevel Texas history course, News: they didn't.
The characters themselves got most of the attention, This definitely is in the
category of romantic suspense, I liked how characters related to each other and grew throughout the story, However, I'd have marked it higher under other circumstances, The plot idea had the potential to be a new favorite, You can't drive a story with character and action alone, especially a historical story, and expect readers to feel anything more than a mansion in a city of unformed mist.
I did guess the serial killer when I "met" him!,