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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:
An immersive tale that will embed you as a member of the small town of Mercy Peak, Colorado in the 1940’s. It all begins as two young girls, from across the country, are paired as pen pals at the age of 10. Over many years they write back and forth to one another becoming the closest of friends. Rusty Bright lives in Mercy Peak, Colorado and Mercy Windsor is from a town in Carolina. As Mercy’s life unwinds in Carolina as she becomes a young woman, she treks across the country to find her childhood friend.
From their letters over the years, they’ve discussed in length about a treasure that Rusty’s father had one of the clues to finding. A tale of four young men that made a promise to find this said treasure and each was given a separate clue as to its whereabouts. But greed overtook one of them and the treasure was never found. Now Mercy Windsor is returning to Mercy Peak to hold of her end of the promise she made Rusty in finding this treasure.
The three main elements in this book circle around friendship, small town dynamics, and the mysterious treasure.
Friendship
Across the country and only on paper, these two young woman created an inseparable bond of friendship that carries through the entire story. Their bond is reflected in the people of Mercy Peak and in their adventures together to solve the mystery of the hidden treasure. But the way Dykes represents this friendship was inspiring and heartfelt. There were so many areas in the story where a small reminder of their closeness had my eyes watering. It’s not often in life you find such heartfelt friendship and the way these two cherish their connection was a wonderful experience.
Small Town Dynamics
Mercy Peak is by all means, a small town. It’s represented as a mining town that is drying up as the miners leave and all that could be found has been. The small population is struggling financially, but wealthy in their relationships and support of one another. Everyone knows everyone else’s business, but in a way that they are all there to help one another. Whether it’s a meal for someone or helping to fix something that’s broken. One of my favorite characters of this town was Priscilla Murdock. She’s the younger sister of one of the men that left the clues for the treasure and her story was emotional and heartbreaking in so many ways. Plus, she’s a little quirky and I really enjoyed her presence.
Mysterious Treasure
The plot emphasis is on finding this treasure or at least understanding the clues left behind. The story has it that these four boys made a promise on a mountainside during a full moon that no matter what happened with all of them, that they’d come back and find it together. One of them did find it and left clues for the others including a cylinder, a rope of leather and some written words with their first clue. But they had to work together to use these clues and it just never happened. Along the way, the only surviving one of them tried to figure it out before he finally perished. It’s completely up to Rusty and Mercy to put all the clues together and the right the wrongs of the formed generations group of friends.
My Favorite Lines:
“Winters were brutal and summers a dream, all blue skies and thunder in concert, canyons spilling wildflowers into lakes so turquoise-bright they seemed shot from stars themselves. Stars in canopy over spark-spinning campfires, making the good folks below ache in the chest to see how vast it all was, how small they were, how right that somehow felt.”
“There’s more people than you’d think out here. The folds of these mountains, they keep souls well. Done so for us, anyway.”
“It was silly, but it felt like a cradle, with the gentlest of hands to rock it. A notion perhaps best fit for fairy stories, but it reached inside her heart to a place she tried not to go: the place that missed the mother she had never known, whose hand had never rocked her.”
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A lost treasure. A riddled quest. The healing power of friendship.
Legends are tucked into every fold of the Colorado mountains surrounding the quaint town of Mercy Peak, where residents are the stuff of tall tales, the peaks are taller still, and a lost treasure has etched mystery into the very terrain.In 1948, when outsider Mercy Windsor arrives after a scandal shatters her gilded world as Hollywood’s beloved leading lady, she is determined to forge a new life in obscurity in this time-forgotten Colorado haven. She purchases Wildwood, an abandoned estate with a haunting history, and begins to restore it to its former glory.But as she does, her every move tugs at the threads of the mountain’s lore, unearthing what became of her long-lost pen pal Rusty Bright, and the whereabouts of the infamous Galloping Goose Railcar No. 8, which vanished years ago–along with the mailbag it carried, whose contents could change the course of countless lives. Not to mention the fabled treasure that–if found–could right so many wrongs.Among the towering mountains that stand as silent witnesses, the ghosts of the past entangle with the courage of the present to find a place where healing, friendship, and hope can abide amid a world forever changed.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Amanda Dykes
Amanda Dykes’s debut novel, Whose Waves These Are, was the winner of the prestigious 2020 Christy Award Book of the Year, a Booklist 2019 Top Ten Romance debut, and the winner of an INSPY Award. She’s also the author of All the Lost Places and Christy Award finalists Yours Is the Night and Set the Stars Alight. Find her online at AmandaDykes.com.
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