The Printed Page

Right now I’m frustrated reader. I’m 140 pages into The Exile of Sara Stevenson by Darci Hannah and if the going gets any slower I’ll soon be sleeping. I so wanted to love this story and was very excited to receive my copy from the Librarything Early Reviewers program. The blurb definitely gives one the feeling that a great story is housed between the front and back covers. And I do love the cover. But I’m as miserable working my through this story as Sara is living at Cape Wrath where she’s been exiled because she’s been a very bad good girl according to society rules of the day. So now comes decision time – do I continue to torture myself hoping for something good on the next page or the page after that or do I just call it quits and move on as I’m wont to do when my interest has fallen by the wayside? Hmmm… this is a very tough decision as I really think there’s a gem hidden in here somewhere but my gut tells me to give it up. My suspicion is that The Exile of Sara Stevenson will be a big hit with a lot of readers and time will show me that its yet another book that getting a lot of great buzz that I tossed aside.

I DNF’d it @ pg. 140. I could use it for a doorstop as Devin, our youngest male cat, has developed an affection for shutting doors and locking himself in but I’ve promised it to another book blogger.

Here’s what others are saying: B.A.B.A.E.L

In 1814, Sara Stevenson, the well-bred but high-spirited daughter of celebrated Scottish lighthouse designer Robert Stevenson, falls in love with a common sailor, Thomas Crichton. On the day of their clandestine elopement, Thomas mysteriously disappears, leaving Sara heartbroken, secretly pregnant, and at the mercy of her overbearing family. Refusing to relinquish her hopes that Thomas will someday return to her, Sara is banished to an eerie lighthouse on lonely and remote Cape Wrath. There she meets William Campbell, the reclusive yet dashing light-keeper who incites her ire—and interest. Soon Sara begins to accept her life on the cape and her growing attraction to William—until a mystifying package from an Oxford antiquarian arrives, giving intriguing clues to Thomas’s whereabouts. Through her correspondence with the antiquarian, Sara slowly uncovers the story of her beloved’s fate. But what she doesn’t immediately grasp is that these letters travel an even greater distance than she could have imagined—as the boundaries between time and space unravel to forge an incredible connection between a woman and a man many years apart.