The House on Tradd Street tells the story of Melinda, a woman with an ability to speak to the dead. No one knows she has this ability and she likes to keep it this way. Her mother left when she was 7 years old and her father has been an alcoholic since she can remember. She has had to fend for herself most of her life and she prefers it that way. She is a high profile realtor in Charleston South Carolina, selling high end homes including the old, southern homes and plantations. When she meets a very old homeowner to talk to him about putting his home on the marketing she never expects to suddenly be willed that home to renovate and solve a mystery that bears similar resemblance to her own life. With the help of her bohemian best friend and a handsome (although she will never admit it) author named Jack Trenholm, she has to figure out a way to renovate a house she didn’t want, find the answer to a decades old mystery and figure out how to keep her feelings for Jack hidden. Just another day.
Karen White is a very talented author. She knows how to write various genres from mystery to romance to fiction. She has a knack for it all. In Tradd Street she is able to weave all 3 of those genres together without dragging the plot. She was able to keep my attention throughout the book; even when a few pages became stagnant and boring she knew how to change the writing style and tactic to suck me right back in. She also knew how to make a stuffy, overworked female in the south seem full of life and interesting by slowly inviting different people into her life that bring out a fraction of herself that she put away a long time ago so she wouldn’t have to feel anything. Jack brings out her wild side and makes her heart race; her best friend helps her to see a world she thought she always saw in a new, brighter light; and her alcoholic father helps her to see a world full of forgiving and acceptance. She never was able to see those things on her own because she always attached lose and heartache to each of those areas. She closed herself off thinking that she was living by never feeling when in reality she was already dead inside.
I am currently reading the next book in the Tradd Street series - Return to Legere Street and it has so much more bitterness and ghosts and mystery than the first. The farther White gets into the series and characters the less restrictions she has and the more risks she takes. The web she weaves of the back and forth between Jack and Mellie is amazing and frustrating at the same time. All I want is for them to yell at each other, admit the feeling and get it over with. But that is always the best kind of relationships in books - the ones that make you wait for chapters upon chapters or books upon books before they will admit their feelings. Keeps you invested and eventually happy at the outcome.
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I don’t know how this one will end but I do know that White has two things to take away from this book - you can’t outrun your true self and you can’t outrun your heart, no matter how far you try to go.
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