When my husband and I went over to my friend and her husband’s house for New Year’s Eve…  or maybe it was after our outing where she introduced me to the wonderful world of Ikea.  At any rate, we’re both big book nerds and we were sitting in her kitchen discussing books.  We were estranged for six years and one of our first conversations after coming back to where we were was about books.  I gave her a list of the books my book club had read in the last year and a half.  She’d read 90% of them.   Add that to our innate love of everything Beatles and irrational passion for Mt. Dew and it’s unbelievable we were ever apart.  But be that as it may, we were and now we’re not, and it’s loverly and we talk about books…  a lot.

So she was telling me about this book she’d read.  The Inheritance.  About someone who inherits a house or something and finds out that it belonged to their grandparents?  And his grandfather ratted out his son because they were hiding Jews out back during the time of the round ups.  Something like that.  I’m sure I’m totally butchering the story line.  But anyway, it sounded right up my alley so when I got home I downloaded it to the Kindle.  We never spoke of authors.

So, while I’m reading this book by Ms. Shapiro I’m swept up in mystery and intrigue and the romanticism of the Scottish highland and the story of a young woman who inherits castle ruins from a grandfather she didn’t know she had.  I was about 25% of the way through when I stopped wondering HOW on earth this would tie into hiding Jews and Nazi raids and realized I was quite simply reading the wrong book.

By that point I was completely sucked into the story and in love with the landscapes it painted in my head.  The story journeys back and forth between Katie Prince, the young woman who one day is stunned by news of a castle and a distillery that she now is the owner of and a woman named Isobel McBride who lived in the castle in 1745 when she was brought to it as a 16-year-old bride to an unloving, harsh man with a dark and handsome cousin.

The book encapsulates the ultimate love story of the past and every girl’s dream of the present (every girl who dreams of finding a long-lost relative in SCOTLAND!  (or Ireland) anyway – and seriously, who DOESN’T?).

I enjoyed every page.

And I do look forward to when I finally read the OTHER The Inheritance.

This was such a fun way to find a book!  I’m so glad that I did.

Available at:  Amazon