🌟🌟🌟🌟💫

I love Maeve Binchy’s books, and this latest endearing read from her, completed just before her untimely passing in 2012, is no exception.

With all the warmth and charm of the author’s signature style, this book deviates slightly to initially follow our main 3rd-person-POV protagonist, Chicky, for a period of about twenty years, through an absorbing series of trials and tribulations, right up to to her plucky opening of a hotel on the coast of Ireland – where she builds a traveler’s retreat consisting of ‘a warm, welcoming house and miles of sand and cliffs and wild birds’.

The story then picks up with a number of chapter-based POV stories featuring one of each of the guests visiting during the hotels opening week.

The stories themselves are rich and evocative, – cozily illuminating a diverse set of lives and loves; secrets and shames; and colorful, meandering, histories – all of which perfectly capture the underlying magic and spirit of this remote Irish community, where everyone knows each others name, and a listening ear and a cup of tea are always on offer.

Few authors have charmed and captivated this reader as consistently and as completely, and it’s sad to realize this will be the final Maeve Binchy book I will ever read.

She will be missed.