Quick summary: This book was stupid.

Longer thoughts: It starts with a rape and ends with the author pretending it wasn’t. The interaction begins with Henry following a very intoxicated Tess up the stairs under the pretense of helping her because she is wobbly and drunk. Once upstairs, he kisses her. She says “I can’t. I’m engaged.” And then she “gives in.” Cut to baby and a complete denial of what this encounter was. I really found it odd that Chamberlain made no real effort to address the four letter word in the room. Moreover, she wants us to root for this dude later on. If she meant it to be a wild night where both parties got carried away, perhaps she should have tried a little harder and dedicated more than a paragraph on how these characters ended up in bed.

She lost me after that. It only went downhill from there with extremely one-demential characters that basically existed to tell Tess that there is “more than meets the eye.” Ooooo. In order to draw out the mystery, a main character is killed off. She got to close to just being upfront with Tess, so she had to go.

The interesting history about immigrant Italian communities in Baltimore and a polio epidemic and important commentary on race and injustice were completely overshadowed by a landslide of crap. Tess felt like a soap opera character. If her evil twin showed up, I could not have been remotely surprised.

In summary: No.