Young Sarah Daniels is the heart, soul and future of The White Hart Inn on the Welsh Back. Alongside the quay and wharves on Bristol’s floating harbour, she dreams of finding love, and a destiny where she can escape the drudgery and tragedy that life usually delivers Victorian women. But dreams are free, and few share her ideals. When reality strikes, and Sarah learns the hard way that life is unkind, one man offers her hope.
Through many decades of heart-aching loss, false promises and broken dreams, the young widow clings to that one hope. With six children to care for, she takes risks few others would consider. She breaks conventions and makes sacrifices to keep that hope alive.
Will her wishes come true, or is she destined to be another unfortunate in the sea of many?
Sarah Daniels has been working at The White Hart Inn for as long as she can remember. With her father as landlord, and her mother in the kitchen, they have always worked together as a family. But, with her parents aging, and her mother often struck down with melancholy, the workload has steadily increased until Sarah is indispensable, running the Inn like a well oiled machine.
When she catches the eye of John Clements, she begins to feel things that she has to turn to her sister for explanations about. The fluttering inside of her when he is ashore, seeking her out to talk to her, flirt with her, is an entirely new feeling, but one that she is more than willing to explore. Soon, with a baby on the way and John back out to sea, Sarah learns that life will not be as easy as she imagined, and that the hard work she has always been used to is about to get a whole lot harder.
I loved Sarah from the very beginning of this book. She is a hard worker, incredibly loyal to her family, and more than willing to step up and take responsibilities when necessary. However, as much as her family are her whole life, they are also sometimes the reason for her struggles. Her mother is prone to attacks of melancholy, still mourning the loss of children who never had a true chance at life, and often takes to her bed, leaving the kitchen in the more than capable hands of Molly, who has worked in the kitchen of The White Hart Inn for years. For Sarah, though, it only increases her workload as she runs back and forth between the bar, the kitchen, and caring for her mother. With the added responsibilities of children, it seems almost impossible for Sarah to continue working as much as she does but, somehow, she manages.
As with many books set in this era, if there is an opportunity for things to go wrong, they will. Sarah fights more than her fair share of battles, trying to keep the Inn open, under her control, and profitable. Keeping her family in line is another issue altogether, and her love life takes more than one drastic turn. There are some unsettling scenes in this novel, when Sarah suffers at the hands of one who is supposed to love and cherish her, as well as some devastating losses, which almost brought me to tears a few times. This book is so captivating, Sarah felt like a dear friend to me as I read, and I only wanted to be able to step into the book and help her, be a friend she could talk to, and help to look after her children so that she could complete all the daily tasks she takes upon herself.
This book follows Sarah for many years, and you get to watch her grow during the course of the novel, from a young adult, in search of life’s joys, to a mature mother, wife, and landlady. Her family is a tricky situation for her, as she is tied to them inexplicably, and would do anything to help and care for her family, but they also bring her down. As her mother’s condition deteriorates, things become strained and tense, but it is difficult to truly blame her mother for any of the things she says or does, for it is out of her own control. The characters in this novel have been crafted wonderfully, and truly feel real. Names of the past have been brought back to life in this book, and, although fictionalised, this novel does feel completely biographical with how in-depth and emotional it is. To think that these people, however fictionalised their lives have been, truly lived over a century ago, and that they have been resurrected in this story is enough to make you feel even closer to them while reading.
The author has done an absolutely fabulous job at creating a story that you truly want to read, and absolutely don’t want to put down. In Sarah, a worthy heroine and protagonist is created, and she feels so real, it makes the highs of the novel even more joyful, and the lows even more heartbreaking. This is a novel that makes you feel, and one that I will absolutely be reading again and again. At times, I almost felt like I was reading a Catherine Cookson novel, the story so compelling and almost timeless. This is certainly an author I will be looking for more books by.
Like the characters in her books, Vicky has a passion for family history and a love of old photos, antiques, and treasures from the past. After researching the history of the time and place, and realising the hardships many people suffered, Vicky knew she wanted to write their stories. Tales of love and loss, and triumph over adversity. Her latest release, Sarah’s Destiny, Book 1 of The Ancestors series, is inspired by a true love story set in Bristol.
Vicky particularly enjoys writing inter-generational sagas, inspired by true stories of early immigrants to New Zealand, linked by journals, letters, photographs, and heirlooms.
She’s an avid reader of historical novels, family sagas and women’s stories and loves to travel when she can. She has a MA(Hons) in English and Education. Her story of Gwenna won gold in The Coffee Pot Book Club Women’s Historical Fiction Book of Year in 2022 and several of her books carry the gold B.R.A.G medallion.
.jpg)
