How actions of the past reflect your present and future.

Synopsis

From the bestselling author of Sweet Tea Tuesdays comes a story of true love that spans decades.

Lillian Alexander’s father is dying of cancer. When he rambles on in a morphine-delirium, Lillian can’t ignore the feeling he’s trying to tell her something. At his funeral days later, she encounters ghosts from her past who stir long-suppressed memories from the day her mother died twenty-seven years ago. Why, if her mother’s death was an accident, does Lillian harbor guilt, as though she were somehow to blame?

When Lillian and her twin sister, Layla, learn the Stoney family fortune is gone, Lillian fights to save her ancestral home on Charleston’s prestigious East Battery. Desperate to resolve her money problems and get answers to her questions about the past, she tears her father’s study apart in search of clues. She discovers a thumb drive in a hollowed-out hardback copy of For Whom the Bell Tolls. The thumb drive, marked For Lillian in his handwriting, contains her father’s memoir. Secluded in the family’s cottage on Wadmalaw Island, she immerses herself in her father’s account of his stormy relationship with her mother. What she learns sets her on a journey of self-discovery.

Tangled in Ivy is a tale of tortured souls and southern family dysfunction

My review

Lillian Alexander took care of her father before losing him to cancer.
The last moments of his life, he was rambling on and Lillian can’t shake the feeling he was trying to tell her something about the past.
And when at the funeral she meets people of that same past, the ball starts rolling. She is having feelings of guilt of her mother’s death 27 years ago.
But why is she feeling guilty if it was an accident?
And will she manage to keep her home, even if her twin sister is adamant on selling it, causing even more rows?

When she finds a thumb drive with her father’s memoirs, she hopes to finds answers to all her questions. But reading about her father’s stormy relationship with her mother, will it give her all her answers?

This is a story that I couldn’t find it easy to put away. The intrigues just kept coming!

When we first meet Lillian, we see immediately how caring she is. It’s not easy taking care of a dying person, especially if it’s your own father.
But she is also determined… she does not believe her father was just rambling around, but was truly trying to tell her something.
So she starts her search, determined to find whatever it was her father hid.

The relationship with her sister is a strained one. And even if this seems very strange, being twins, it will all make sense the more we read into the story.
Layla was in my opinion a spoiled brat, wanting everything that will advantage her and not thinking about her sister at all. Also how she acts towards Lillian, made me dislike her.

This story goes back and forth between Lillian and her father Graham his memoirs.
And when we get to know young Graham, and his troubled childhood. And when he finally settles down I was truly happy for him.
His meeting with Ivy was not what I wanted for him… Ivy is used to get what she wants, and is also very close, even too close with her best friend. Whatever one of them does, the other one does immediately the same.
When Graham is gently pushed into marriage, I took this as a bad omen… He truly cares about Ivy, but are his feelings reciprocated? 

Without giving more details about the actual story, this story is intriguing, settling and there are some twists I did not see coming.
The writing is very captivating, holding your attention until the very ending. All the characters are well developed, and even if I didn’t like all of them, it all makes sense now…

A story about how something that happened in the past, can keep influencing you and your future. But also about making things right and fighting for your rights and your happiness.