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An ARC copy of this book was provided to me in exchange for my honest review. All thoughts are my own.
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MY REVIEW:
A masterpiece of literature! A historical fiction romance you won’t want to miss if you adore anything with a Jane Austen feel to it. What the Mountains Remember follows the main character Belle Newbold, the step-daughter of a wealthy oil and gas man who is taking his family on the trip of a lifetime with the Vagabonds of the early 1900’s.
If you want to learn more about Henry Ford and his group of Vagabonds, start HERE.
The main characters of this story are on one such “glamping” trip along with the Vagabonds and observe the construction of the iconic Grove Park Inn.
If you want to learn more about the historic Grove Park Inn, start HERE.
Belle Newbold is captivated by the hotel and all that goes into it’s construction, including the people behind its creation. She spends much of the story meeting with the craftsman to interview them and writing their story. Which was a questionable profession for a woman during this time period. Not to mention that tuberculosis is running rampant in these parts during this time, putting the construction at risk and everyone involved with it.
While the story focuses much of it’s time on this building, and I loved learning so much about it, I was also transfixed by the multifaceted character of Belle and her betrothed, Worth. Belle has a secret history that she cannot afford to let anyone find out. But she knows she needs to marry soon to ensure her future and refuses to have a love match. She saw the devastation her mother endured at the loss of her father and her resolve is strong in that she never wants to experience that kind of loss.
A young man from the same wealthy circles as her step father has agreed to marry her, but he also carries his own secrets, and they are meeting during this trip to assure their engagement and learn more about one another. As their interactions increase and they realize they both share a love for the same sorts of things – including their interest in all types of people and the nature of the world around them – they’re both terrified of falling in love. The exact thing both of them want to avoid.
It’s a breathtaking journey across a landscape that you can’t help but fall in love with and characters that will warm your heart with their kindness and outlook on life. Plus, a wonderfully dreadful cousin that Belle must contend with whose jealousy borders on mania. Her dangerous behavior puts not only herself at risk, but everything that Belle and her mother have worked to put behind them.
My Favorite Quotes:
- “I appreciated the way he stood up for me, the way he saw value in who I was beyond a vessel that would someday bear him children.”
- “There are three options when a woman is ignited into fury. She can fight, she can let it consumer her, or she can flee.”
- “Mother always told me you could see love plain in a look, though the beholder and the beholden would never see it. It’s a gift, perhaps, from God to show us that true love isn’t just a phantom.”
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At this wondrous resort, secrets can easily be hidden in plain sight when the eye is trained on beauty.
April 1913—Belle Newbold hasn’t seen mountains for seven years—since her father died in a mining accident and her mother married gasoline magnate, Shipley Newbold. But when her stepfather’s business acquaintance, Henry Ford, invites the family on one of his famous Vagabonds camping tours, she is forced to face the hills once again—primarily in order to reunite with her future fiancé, owner of the land the Vagabonds are using for their campsite, a man she’s only met once before. It is a veritable arranged marriage, but she prefers it that way. Belle isn’t interested in love. She only wants a simple life—a family of her own and the stability of a wealthy man’s pockets. That’s what Worth Delafield has promised to give her and it’s worth facing the mountains again, the reminder of the past, and her poverty, to secure her future.
But when the Vagabonds group is invited to tour the unfinished Grove Park Inn and Belle is unexpectedly thrust into a role researching and writing about the building of the inn—a construction the locals are calling The Eighth Wonder of the World—she quickly realizes that these mountains are no different from the ones she once called home. As Belle peels back the facade of Grove Park Inn, of Worth, of the society she’s come to claim as her own, and the truth of her heart, she begins to see that perhaps her part in Grove Park’s story isn’t a coincidence after all. Perhaps it is only by watching a wonder rise from ordinary hands and mountain stone that she can finally find the strength to piece together the long-destroyed path toward who she was meant to be.
International bestselling author Joy Callaway returns with a story of the ordinary people behind extraordinary beauty—and the question of who gets to tell their stories.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Joy Callaway
Joy Callaway is the international bestselling author of The Grand Design, The Fifth Avenue Artists Society, and Secret Sisters. She lives in Charlotte, NC with her family.
Adventures in Literature 
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