life_full_ofbooks's reviews
2518 reviews

Once again Ms. Hilderbrand made me fall in love with wonderful characters. In reading this series you’re going to want to immediately start the next one since they end on cliffhangers and the last one is going to leave you wanting more.

What a powerful book! With everything going on in this world today this is a book that needs to be read so people who don’t live these lives daily can get a glimpse into someone else’s reality.

While I found the topics of the Blue Fugates of TN and The Pack Horse Library Program to be fascinating this book didn’t cut it for me. I felt like poor Cussy Mary had nothing but heartbreak in her life and at each turn something worse seemed to happen. I fully recognize that anyone who is different will face adversaries in their life and they will have difficulties in their lives because of it, but the amount of sadness in this book was overwhelming for me. I do think the author did a good job of combining 2 historical moments in one book, though I didn’t like how she manipulated the story to include something that didn’t happen during the time period. I also wasn’t keen on the ending.

I started this book off by reading it but at 25% in I had to switch to audio because I was having a hard time concentrating given the narrative nature of the story. I am so happy I switched versions and I didn’t put it down because this ended up being one of the most charming books I have ever read. The author sets all of the scenes and describes all of the characters beautifully and I truly felt like I was part of the book. Do not let the long descriptions or narrative nature turn you away from this gem of a book!

I absolutely love Elin Hilderbrand’s books. They are such great escapes because who doesn’t escape when you’re transported to Nantucket? I wasn’t fond of the personalities of the protagonists of this book but they lent very well to the storyline and I fully believe you can enjoy a book while not enjoying the characters.
I read The Winter Street Series first and quite a few of the characters from The Rumor are in that so it was fun to see the “before”, so to speak.

I’m rounding up from 3.5 to 4 stars since we can’t give half stars. I greatly enjoyed this story. I found it to be a very intriguing social study into how our society treats those we deem different and how you view yourself and what you think you deserve out of life plays a bigger part in your destiny than how society views you. I wasn’t crazy about the writing style, though. I listened to this so perhaps in the book there are page breaks, but in listening to it it seemed to jump abruptly from viewpoints and time periods.