This review contains affiliate links, which earn me a small commission when you click and purchase, at no extra cost to you. Thank you for supporting my small business and allowing me to continue providing you a reliable resource for clean book ratings.
Flora, Kat and Lauren are half-sisters, their charismatic father a well-known artist. They are quite close in age, Charlie Finch having cheated on each of their mothers. They didn’t see each other very often growing up except during their summers together at their grandparents’ home in Cornwall. One summer, during which their father famously painted them sitting together on a sofa next to a large birdcage, something terrible happened, and they haven’t been back since. Now, their father is insisting they come to Rock Point, saying he has an important announcement to make.
Lauren in particular is not eager to go back. Just thinking about that summer — the total eclipse that brought crowds of tourists to the beach; the making of that masterpiece, Girls and Birdcage; her aversion to her grandmother’s parrot, which is still alive 20 years later; those insistent and uncomfortable feelings of being out of place with her older two sisters — brings back more anxiety than she may be able to handle. But she dutifully travels from London out to the large vacation home, this time in the cold of winter.
The three women are happy to see each other, but they are wary about their father’s motivations. And being in that house unsettles them. The big topic they have stepped around for years is hanging over them. On top of that, they start receiving anonymous notes. Someone is watching them, blaming them for the tragedy they don’t want to talk about.
But the only way to heal their wounds is to finally be open about what happened, about whatever parts they played. And finally, the three women learn there is more to the story than even they knew.
The Birdcage is another very satisfying story of a family with buried secrets being forced to face them years later. Eve Chase is adept at this genre; I read this because I appreciated the other two books like this I’ve read of hers: The Wildling Sisters and The Daughters of Foxcote Manor (which apparently is also called The Glass House). I just think I preferred those other two a bit more because they were only rated moderate, rather than high.
Rated: High. Profanity includes 11 uses of strong language, about a dozen instances of moderate profanity, 30 uses of mild language, and about 45 instances of the name of Deity in vain. Sexual content includes a number of references to affairs but no scenes, as well as references to the painter character using a lot of nude subjects. There are a couple of brief scenes including nudity. A character dies from an allergic reaction and another falls and there are mentions of blood.
*I received an ARC of this book in exchange for my honest review.
