Review: Sincerely Yours by Laurie Alice Eakes, Ann Shorey, Amanda Cabot, and Jane Kirkpatrick

 

Sincerely Yours is a four story collection of novellas by authors Laurie Alice Eakes, Ann Shorey, Amanda Cabot, and Jane Kirkpatrick.  Even though the stories are less than a hundred pages, each was entertaining and read like a full length novel.   Each story has a central part of history where the action happens and starts off with a letter that changes each woman’s destiny.  The first novella is by Laurie Alice Eakes and takes place on board a steamboat on the Erie Canal.  This was a rather adventurous story of a stowaway, kidnapping, explosions, and through all that, the couple’s chance to fall in love.  The second novella was Ann Shorey’s which takes place during 1858.  Here our heroine is a very gifted writer in a man’s world who is innocently mistaken as a male writer due to the use of her initials.  This was an entertaining read of pretend and false identities between our heroine and her piano teacher.  The third novella was by Amanda Cabot and was about a gentleman carousel carver who was keeping his true identity secret and an American heiress who wanted to prove she was more useful than a decoration on her husband’s arm.  The backdrop was the first type of a vacation resort.  The final story by Jane Kirkpatrick had a little bit of a darker side.  It was about a Sanatorium in Washington officially known as Wilderness Heights, but called Starvation Heights by the local townspeople.  The clinic “doctor” would have the patients starve the illness out of them and give them her own concoction of medicines and treatments.  In this novella our heroine Grace receives a letter from her dear friend’s daughter to help get her mother out of this clinic.  As Grace proceeds to rescue her friend and find out information about this clinic, she meets a certain gentleman who is very mysterious and works for the clinic owners.  In the notes the author gives us a brief history of this very real at one time clinic which makes this story all the more chilling.  I received this book from the The Book Club Network, Inc. (TBCN) and the opinions are my own.