Bellevue by Alison Booth

From Goodreads

New South Wales, 1972. Following the death of her beloved Aunt Hilda, widow Clare Barclay inherits Bellevue, an historic property in the Blue Mountains township of Numballa, Australia.

Giving up her teaching job to move to the mountains, Clare plans to restore the house to its original glory. She also hopes to track down a box of missing documents that may shed light on why husband Jack secretly second-mortgaged their former home.

Clare makes friends with the locals, including a young boy, Joe, and soon hears of plans to redevelop Numbulla and to exploit the land bordering the protected wilderness area. As she joins the protest against the rezoning, it's clear someone doesn't want her there and they'll do anything to stop her...

Written from Clare's and Joe's perspectives, Bellevue highlights cross-generational bonds that grow between them as they struggle, individually and together, towards an acceptance of the losses each has sustained.

My thoughts

My thanks to Helen Richardson for organising the Blog Tour of this book and allowing me to take part in it.  I have the great pleasure of kicking the blog tour off.  

Alison Booth has written other books in the past, but this is the first one of hers that I have read and if the others are as good as this one, then I look forward to reading them all in due course.  

Set mainly in Australia in the 1970's the story follows Clare who inherits a property called Bellevue from her husband's Aunt Hilda who had sadly died.  Clare herself is a widow, her husband having previously passed away and as she settles into the house that she has inherited, she feels that things aren't quite as they seem and she gets the feeling that people don't want her there.  Perhaps, other family members from her husband Jack's thought that Clare shouldn't have inherited the house and that they expected to be the beneficiary of it themselves.  As Clare moves into Bellevue and begins to form a life for herself in the area, she forges a special friendship with a local young boy called Joe.  Life for Clare isn't easy at all, her husband had left her in a mess as he'd done things that she didn't know about until after he'd passed away.  Do any of us truly know our partners?  As she tries to find out why he'd done what he did, she uncovers secrets from the past that she didn't know about which may impact on her future.  

Told in several parts, we are soon immersed in the lives of the characters at different times in their lives.  The story is told mainly from the perspective of Clare, but we also have parts that are from the perspective of young Joe and it's great to see the events that occur in the story from more than one characters perspective.  I also felt that the house Bellevue itself was a character as it formed a huge portion of the story in more ways than one.  This was a story that was rich in both character and surroundings, the author has a way with words that draws you in and makes you feel that you're actually there with them.  

How many of us would love to be in another country like Australia rather than where we actually are?  If you can answer yes to the question, then grab a copy of this and immerse yourself Down Under.