Kristy Cambron's "Castle on the Rise" - Lost Castle, book 2

Three timelines centered around one castle weave together to capture Ireland's history and hope for the future. Approaching the turn of the 19th century, Maeve tries to hold her estate together as  catholic fights protestant and Ireland rebels against England. During the Easter Uprising of 1916, Issy steps outside the bounds of her aristocratic upbringing to capture on film Ireland's bloody push for freedom. Today, Laine Forrester, barely holding herself together after the crumbling of her own marriage, travels to Ireland to stand by her best friend as she begins her marriage with cancer treatments.

Between the title and the subject matter, I had the song The Rising of the Moon running through my head for pretty much the entirety of the novel. I loved the history included in this book--it wasn't until college that I learned anything about Ireland's bloody history of failed rebellion after failed rebellion under British rule, and it was exciting to find a story set during some of those pivotal moments.

It figures that Eoin was my favorite hero--he and Maeve are the couple I cried over by far the most (oh, that ending . . . ). I love that Maeve's desire is to bring unity in a divided nation, while Issy's goal is to visually capture the truth of the uprising. And Laine has some powerful moments herself while standing up with her best friend as she begins cancer treatments. The hair-cutting scene was wrenching and uplifting at the same time.

The one thing that consistently bothers me about multi-timeline novels is that two--or in this case, three--stories are fit into the same space as a normal full-length novel. Thus I'm caught up in three different stories, wishing that each could be a full novel rather than a mere third of one. But to be fair they were balanced well, and I never grew bored with any of them. The two historical timelines fit really well together,  while the modern one a little less well (it had emotional stakes, like the other two, but lacked the physical stakes). Cambron went somewhere I didn't expect with one of the timelines, and it was all the more powerful for it; I loved it and thoroughly disliked it at the same time (which is to say it was really good, even if it left me an emotional wreck).

I received a complimentary copy of this book from Thomas Nelson through NetGalley. Opinions expressed in this review are completely my own.

Lost Castle

1. The Lost Castle

2. Castle on the Rise

3. The Painted Castle