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Seasons Collection: Season of Shadow and Light

Seasons Collection: Season of Shadow and Light 2

by Jenn J. McLeod
Paperback
Publication Date: 01/05/2015
5/5 Rating 2 Reviews

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$29.99

Sometime this season ...

The secret keeper must tell.

The betrayed must trust.

The hurt must heal.


When it seems that everything Paige trusts is beginning to betray her, she leaves her husband at home and sets off on a road trip with her six-year-old daughter, Matilda, and Nana Alice in tow.

But stranded amid rising floodwaters on a detour to the tiny town of Coolabah Tree Gully, Paige discovers the greatest betrayal of all happened there twenty years earlier.

Someone knows that truth can wash away the darkest shadows, but . . . are some secrets best kept for the sake of others?

ISBN:
9781925030280
9781925030280
Category:
Contemporary fiction
Format:
Paperback
Publication Date:
01-05-2015
Publisher:
Simon & Schuster
Dimensions (mm):
234x155mm
Weight:
0.63kg
Jenn J. McLeod

After leaving the corporate working world, Jenn J. McLeod decided to travel Australia in a fifth-wheeler caravan and fulfil her lifelong ambition to write.

She has since published four novels.

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Reviews

4.67

Based on 2 reviews

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2 Reviews

I have only heard good things about the Seasons Collection and Jenn's debut House of all Seasons was one of our book club reads, one I unfortunately didn't read but have got on my towering TBR to get to. After having read Season of Shadow and Light I am even more determined to go back and read the first two in the collection.

Season of Shadow and Light is a complex story filled with secrets which make for some intense mystery that kept me guessing, some of those guesses made room for some hairy situations had they come to pass. It is a story of family, of trust, of betrayal and most of all of healing. I loved it from the very first page to the very last.

We have multiple story tellers, three for the most part but then an extra joins the ranks late in the piece, for a broad perspective and a much more insightful story. This method allowed us to see deep inside the story, and understand motivations that we may not have otherwise while driving the mystery and sustaining suspense. Yes, there were some predictable outcomes but there were some that took quite a bit of working out and many is it or isn't it moments all the while ensuring that not all the questions were answered.

Paige Turner has given herself a time out from her life and packed up her 6 year old daughter Matilda for a road trip. Perhaps a little rash, not completely thought out, but something she felt she had to do and when Alice couldn't talk her out of it she decided to tag along. The plan was to head to small town Saddleton with some half baked idea to find out a little more about her history because she knows very little about her mothers roots.

The dynamics in Season of Shadow and Light are not so much new but not often explored, it is becoming much more common now but this was a family dynamic that I was new to in literature. Paige grew up with two mothers in a time that it was far from common, and even further from socially acceptable so the fact that her history goes back no further than her birth is not that hard to understand. Nancy was Paige's birth mother, who passed away when she was a child, and Alice was her partner. After Nancy's death Alice took on the role as Paige's mother and that made life a little simpler.

The timeline jumps around a little which I did have trouble following at times because the characters seemed to wander off into their memories without notice, totally sidetracking a scene and there were times I wasn't quite sure if we ended up getting to the end of the scene in the present because we got so caught up in the past. Except for the fact that it confused me at times this helped to drive the story because so much was rooted in the history of these characters.

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Season of Shadow and Light is the third book in the Seasons Collection by Australian author, Jenn J McLeod. Paige Turner is determined to go on a road trip: she needs a break from her cheating husband, needs to sort out her life, and heading to Saddleton on the strength of a tiny clue about her deceased mum seems a good idea. She will take along six-year-old Matilda, and sixty-year-old Nana Alice has reluctantly decided to go along too. But weather conspires against them, and they are detoured to, and stranded in the town of Coolabah Tree Gully.

After a night at the Billabong Hotel, they become the guests of Sharni and young son Liam at Nevaeh, a hillside property. Mati is happy to explore with Liam, and the country pace and fresh air suit Paige (and dishy pub chef Aiden is an added attraction), but Alice is cranky and eager to return home. She realises that Coolabah Tree Gully may well be the place from which Nancy, Paige’s mother (and Alice’s one true love), escaped years earlier. Could the secret Alice has promised to keep for thirty years be revealed? Yet, when her lies are threatened with exposure, it is curiosity that keeps her from fleeing.

Most of the story is told from three different points of view: Paige, Alice and Aiden each relate present day events as well as recalling the past. None of them knows all the facts, so McLeod adds a sense of mystery, planting clues for readers, throwing in the odd red herring and finally revealing the who and the what and the why. McLeod captures country NSW with consummate ease: her descriptions are evocative and her characters, familiar to anyone who has travelled over the divide. The plot has a few twists, there is humour and heartache, and the ending is realistic: “There were lessons learned about secrets and lies, trust and betrayal, family, friendship and forgiveness”. A very enjoyable read.

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