⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
🌶️🌶️🌶️
Thank you to Rebecca Byron for the ARC. I absolutely loved this unique story. I just finished and I can’t stop smiling! Opinion and review is 100% my own.
I love Byron’s prose. Her descriptive language made the feelings of the MC’s palpable. I was trying to think of how I’d describe this and it was really a cozy, paranormal, romance mystery. The way it was presented was absolutely captivating. Rebecca completely brings the characters, settings, and their emotions to life. When our FMC was spiraling with information overload with the state of her reality – her sadness was tangible. But conversely, the spice was perfection - not overwhelming but so well thought-out… and REAL. I can’t even begin to explain how real it was because of the emotional angle she took with these scenes–it was so well delivered that it was just – RIGHT. It was just right. I absolutely loved the ending and that it wasn’t a cliffhanger but just getting us all set up for something else. Brillant - cause I wasn’t ready to be pissed off today.
So, in a nutshell, Mira is a clairvoyant with the ability to sense deeply rooted feelings in items… happiness, love or even grief and sorrow. When she touches a portrait miniature hidden in her parent’s safe-deposit box, she’s drawn into the haunting memories surrounding it - those of the life of Agnes Garvie. It doesn’t go unnoticed, however, that the likeness of the portrait is almost a mirror image of herself – yet this pendant is over 250 years old.
If she wants answers, she has to seek them out herself as her parents recently died in a car accident. Knowing there were others in her lineage in Scotland that have a “gift” such as she, her bags were packed after having made connections on an ancestral website.
The only hiccup in this plan is that she’s plagued by nightmares that seem way too real by a pair of haunting grey eyes. She feels like the vision of whatever that pendant shared was a thread that is slowly starting to unravel her. Is she being hunted or is she being haunted? Or is Agnes?
The MMC is Baird, a Scottish cattle farmer with a big, fluffy sidekick named Bunny. Baird is a man of few words who seems to be haunted by something – the present? The past? We learn he, too, is fiercely independent with secrets and a past of his own. He’s hesitant to engage with anyone. Yet, when the two cross paths it seems serendipitous. They each feel the pull - as if these two were destined to meet as if it were woven by fate. We just have to see if this woman can trust her instincts and her heart and if this MMC can conquer his past.
💞💞LOVED💞💞
💞 eternal love
💞 the smirk
💞
💞
💞
🫤MEH🫤 Meh’s are the things that make me… meh
🫤 the name “Agnes” … visceral reaction. Don’t like it – regardless of if it was appropriate for the times. LOL
🫤 Chapters written for Mira are in first person and Chapters written for Baird are third person. That was an odd jump for me but it didn’t take away from the enjoyability of the book (obviously).
📜FAVORITE QUOTES📜
📜 I loved the description she shared of her close friend, Anne “She never let cynicism win… she’d be out here planting hope like wildflowers – reckless, bright, and utterly convinced something beautiful would grow.” That whole passage just made me smile
📜 “He gave me the distance I needed, even when I couldn’t find the strength to take it myself.”
📜 “Don’t forget this.”
📜 The kind of physical connection that rearranges your sense of self - and then leaves you haunted by it.
📜 “This place, this road – it was leading me exactly where I was meant to go. To the love I was meant to find. A love strong enough to stretch across oceans, lifetimes, and everything in between.”