I'd heard quite a bit of buzz about this series. Rave reviews in Facebook groups. I happened upon a paperback in a Little Free Library and picked it up, then checked the library for audio/Kindle copy. Looooong waits, months! I waited, and got the audio (didn't time it well for the Kindle copy, but checked out the sample which had the TOC). Dived in ...

I didn't love it. It was fine, but nothing special, and at 500+ pages, it was a bit of a push to get through. Two timelines, the present day, featuring Maia as the MC (first person/past tense), and then the past, starting in Nov1927, Isabela (third person/past tense).

One thing that bugged me as this POV shift occurred, was that the Isabela storyline was presented as coming from letters (and then a story being told by another person at a later point) ... yet the text is not written in letter format, it's absolutely a novel. Why are WE/the reader getting this full story, when Maia only has letters, and what exactly is Maia uncovering, as she couldn't possibly be reading the full entirety that the reader is? It just really felt like a misrepresentation of what Maia was learning.

Both story lines were just typical stuff that I felt like I'd read hundreds of times before, nothing that interesting or memorable.

I'm very picky with my reading time ... even getting 20+ books in a month, a know I'll not get to so many great books in my lifetime. Series ... it takes a lot to keep me going, and I don't think I'll continue on with this one. In my younger years (before digital, when it was more difficult to find something to read) I bet I would have been thrilled to find this, and I would have continued on through all seven books.