The Lost Castle

by Kristy Cambron

I bought this book on impulse.  I have been reading a lot of books about World War II lately, I am getting a bit tired of that theme and will have to try to get into some more modern or different stuff for a break...

In this book the main character Ellie, was orphaned at 11 when her parents were killed.  She was raised by her Grandmother Vi, and loves her very much.  Ellie is summoned to the care home where here Grandmother is suffering from dementia and failing health.   Her grandmother is very restless and seems to be wating for something/someone. Ellie's grandmother starts to mumble about a brooch.  Then she show Ellie a book in French and points to a story about a sleeping beauty.  A picture falls out of a book with a picture of her grandmother in front of some ruins with a man.

Ellie decides to leave her grandmother and head to France.  She is in a rented car and is trying to find the estate she is booked to stay at.  A man drives by and is frustrated to find out that his grandfather has booked her to stay at their vineyard estate. The young man is actually Irish. Ellie insists that she has paid for accommodation and a tour guide.  The man begrudingly takes her to the family home where she meets the Grandfather, a vitner.

The book also includes events at an estate in the Loire Valley during the French revolution.  A young woman, Aveline is scheduled to meet her fiance, whom she has not met up that point, at a party at his estate.  However the engagement party is disrupted when the building is attacked and set on fire by revolutionaries.  Aveline suffers some burns and is rescued by her brother's fiance.  She assumes the role of a worker on the estate to avoid being found and attacked by revolutionaries.  Aveline is quite opinionated, keeps up on politics, against her fathers wishes, and actually has sympathized with the poor people of France. Her Fiancee had escaped to Paris.

Aveline is a bit scarred by the fire, including her face.  She is afraid her Fiancee will not want her.  Eventually he does come for her and takes her back to Paris.  Unfortunately she has fallen in love with his brother.  Eventually she returns to the ruined castle to tell her fiancee's brother that her sister is marrying her fiancee and she wants to spend her life with him rebuilding the castle.  Word of her generosity to the poor assures that she is accepted by the locals.

Ellie wants to see the castle that people refer to as the Sleeping Beauty castle but the young man, Quinn, says the owner discourages vistors and that it is patrolled to keep people out.

As these stories are being told we learn about a young British woman, fluent in several languages, who is running for her life in the French countryside.  She is found and sheltered by a French resistance fighter and they fall in love.  Once they learn of her skill they have her hidden away in a basement listening to German radio traffic.  She also had some incriminating information about the Germans hidden in the sole of her shoe.  The shoes where entrusted to her by someone who was being taken to be executed by the Germans. She eventually reveals this information.

Quinn thinks that Ellie is just another romantic tourist.  She eventually shows him the picture of her Grandmother at the castle.  They later see more pictures of her Grandmother and other resistance fighters at a church in a nearby town.  When Quinn and his  Grandfather realize who her Grandmother is they tell her that her Grandmother was in love with the Grandfather's brother Julien, but Julien got killed in the war.  The Grandmother had left behind a diary outlining everything she could find about the local resistance fighters.  They tell Ellie that Julian left the castle land to her Grandmother and assume the land will now be hers.  Ellie returns to the U.S. with the book her grandmother wrote, tells her grandmother she has discovered her history.  Quinn, who has by now fallen for Ellie, comes to the U.S. to find her to bring her back to France.

It was a bit of a Chic Lit book but the stories were certainly well developed and suspenseful.   Some of the people got to live with the men they had fallen in love with.