The Secret of Pembrooke Park by Julie Klassen
Friday, January 2, 2015
Pembrooke Park is a mansion which belonged to a family named Pembrooke. Pembrooke Park is in England. The time is the Nineteenth Century. Each person has a personal reason to return to Pembrooke Park. For those who are already living there, Pembrooke Park is like a living place that they pay tribute to each day by telling about hauntings and treasure. All have one thing in common. There is a need to make peace with the past. This is Christian Fiction at its best. Julie Klassen is an author with an extraordinary ability to make the past come alive. There are fine details that can not go unnoticed: a dollhouse, a green cloaked man or just his skull, a rusty gun, letters and journal entries placed between bricks in a wall, an emerald necklace and even a secret room.
What really stays with me is the power of a scandal to hurt or destroy people. It hurts the people directly involved and those who just like a nicely packaged piece of gossip each morning with their cup of coffee. In The Secret of Pembrooke Park, there is the chance to see how murder weighs on the minds and bodies of the people involved. Murder can also change lives forever. It can leave distressful feelings of revenge, hate, loss for decades. Scandal becomes more intoxicating if there is money involved. To make it more romantic call the money treasure. However, a word like treasure can have more than one meaning. Anyway, treasure makes the maid wiggle as she bakes bread and talks and makes the Lord while drinking tea seem like an historical professor. I suppose it's movie drama in real life.
Abigail Foster is a distant relative of the Pembrookes. Miles Pembrooke is one of the closest relative who arrive on the scene. Although there is this need to follow the past down its crooked road, there are the present day romances in the novel. There is the relationship between Abigail and William, the Curate. There isAbigail's beautiful sister, Louisa, who turns every guy's head for at least a moment. There is perhaps a symbolic and religious meaning to the fires that happen unexpectantly in the novel. There are characters with a hidden identity. It seems Julie Klassen wants to make a point about the desire or lust for material things. There is the one scripture given in the novel about not lusting for things that can be destroyed by rust or....
Although I have never traveled to England, Julie Klassen makes the setting very real. Lo and behold at the end of the novel,, she tells about a real house in England that inspired her to write The Secret of Pembrooke Park.This house is called Great Chalfield Manor in Wiltshire, England.
julieklassenThe_Secret_of_Pembrooke_Park_2/The_Secret_of_Pembrooke_Park_2/index.html I could go on and on writing about The Secret of Pembrooke Park. I will definitely miss the people and the place. I'm beginning to feel a bit homesick now. I have also read The Dancing Master by julie Klassen. I fully recommend it too. I also have to write about Manderley in Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier. Pembrooke Park made me think of Manderley. What can I say? The novel is as rich as a delicious dessert. Thank you for writing it, Julie Klassen.julieklassen
I suppose these words are a type of dedication in the front of the novel. These words leave me shaking in my boots with the desire to try and be a better person tomorrow.
For nothing is secret,
that shall not be evident:
neither anything hid,
that shall not be known,
and come to light.
--Luke 8:17 GNV
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