Review: What the Mountains Remember
Today, I’m sharing a book review for What the Mountains Remember, a historical novel by Joy Callaway.
Disclosure: I voluntarily received a complimentary copy from the author as part of Austenprose PR publicity tours. All views expressed are my own. This post includes Amazon affiliate links.
My Review
What the Mountains Remember is an engaging novel based on the history of the Grove Park Inn in Asheville, North Carolina. The story takes place while the inn was being built in 1913. It revolves around Henry Ford’s Vagabond camping tours, which I had never heard of before. Essentially, “glamping” in the early days of the automobile. I want to be a Vagabond!
Belle is the perfect heroine for this story, with a secret background of a poor mining family. It was easy to share her frustration with her ditzy, entitled step-cousin who kept getting in the way and causing problems. I was fascinated to observe the building process and the setting of the beautiful Grove Park Inn right along with her.
It is a riveting story. I highly recommend it.
From the Publisher
At this wondrous resort, secrets can easily be hidden in plain sight when the eye is trained on beauty.
April 1913—Belle Newbold hasn’t seen mountains for seven years—since her father died in a mining accident and her mother married gasoline magnate, Shipley Newbold. But when her stepfather’s business acquaintance, Henry Ford, invites the family on one of his famous Vagabonds camping tours, she is forced to face the hills once again—primarily in order to reunite with her future fiancé, owner of the land the Vagabonds are using for their campsite, a man she’s only met once before. It is a veritable arranged marriage, but she prefers it that way. Belle isn’t interested in love. She only wants a simple life—a family of her own and the stability of a wealthy man’s pockets. That’s what Worth Delafield has promised to give her and it’s worth facing the mountains again, the reminder of the past, and her poverty, to secure her future.
But when the Vagabonds group is invited to tour the unfinished Grove Park Inn and Belle is unexpectedly thrust into a role researching and writing about the building of the inn—a construction the locals are calling The Eighth Wonder of the World—she quickly realizes that these mountains are no different from the ones she once called home. As Belle peels back the facade of Grove Park Inn, of Worth, of the society she’s come to claim as her own, and the truth of her heart, she begins to see that perhaps her part in Grove Park’s story isn’t a coincidence after all. Perhaps it is only by watching a wonder rise from ordinary hands and mountain stone that she can finally find the strength to piece together the long-destroyed path toward who she was meant to be.
International bestselling author Joy Callaway returns with a story of the ordinary people behind extraordinary beauty—and the question of who gets to tell their stories.
About the Author
Joy Callaway is the author of All the Pretty Places, The Grand Design, The Fifth Avenue Artists Society, and Secret Sisters. She holds a BA in journalism and public relations from Marshall University and an MMC from the University of South Carolina. She resides in Charlotte, North Carolina, with her husband, John, and her children, Alevia and John. Visit her online at joycallaway.com.
