From the bestselling author of The Bourbon Thief comes a sweeping tale of loss and courage, where one woman discovers that her destiny is written in sand, not carved in stone.Faye Barlow is drowning. After the death of her beloved husband, Will, she cannot escape her grief and most days can barely get out of bed. But when she’s offered a job photographing South Carolina’s storied coast, she … coast, she accepts. Photography, after all, is the only passion she has left.In the quaint beach town, Faye falls in love again when she sees the crumbling yet beautiful Bride Island lighthouse and becomes obsessed with the legend surrounding The Lady of the Light–the keeper’s daughter who died in a mysterious drowning in 1921. Like a moth to a flame, Faye is drawn to the lighthouse for reasons she can’t explain. While visiting it one night, she is struck by a rogue wave and a force impossible to resist drags Faye into the past–and into a love story that is not her own.Fate is changeable. Broken hearts can mend. But can she love two men separated by a lifetime?
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What a fantastic story! I was hooked to the very end! I highly recommend!
“I’m just like this lighthouse. Still standing, still here. But I’m falling apart. The light’s off, and I don’t know how to turn it back on again.”
The moment I read: …an enthralling new novel about a woman swept away by the tides who awakens to find herself in 1921, reunited with the husband she’s been mourning for four years., I couldn’t wait to get my hands on this book. There is just something about characters being reunited with lost love that speaks to my heart. Tiffany did an amazing job with this story. The Night Mark starts with showing us Faye, a strong and independent woman living in the year 2015. She doesn’t know what to do with her life and how to find happiness. She is lost. I really enjoyed that we got to know her really well and see what was going on in her life. It made it very easy for me to connect with her character.
When a friend reaches out to her about a job, she agrees to be the photographer for the Ladies of the Lowcountry Preservation Society who need a photographer for their annual “Journey Through Time” fundraising calendar. Photography is her passion and after four years of pausing her life she wants to try living again. She arrives in Beaufort and meets the most intriguing people. I loved Faye’s character and I enjoyed watching her grow in this book. The time travel aspect was done phenomenally and it fit the story well. This isn’t your regular time-travel romance novel, it is so much more. I really loved the mystery aspect because it had me guessing throughout the book. Everything was connected and was really thought out. The secondary characters stole my heart and they added so much to the story. This book was a big puzzle and all the pieces fit perfectly together. I couldn’t contain my tears and cried a couple of times. There is just something about second chance romances that gets me all emotional, especially the ones with the soul-mate type of love.
I really loved this book. I also love that the blurb doesn’t contain too much information. The best way is to go in blind and ride the wave. However I do wish the book was longer. I wanted to see the characters grow more as a couple. In my opinion that would’ve made this book perfect. At the end I just had this feeling that there was something missing, that I didn’t get complete closure. Maybe I am just greedy and didn’t want to say goodbye to the characters. I highly recommend people to pick this book up, it was a very touching and magical journey full of miracles.
Reminiscent of Outlander, The Night Mark is an accidental time travel romance that alternates between 2015 and 1921. Fans of Tiffany Reisz will appreciate that this novel’s romance shines front and center and Ms. Reisz herself noted she believes it to be her most romantic story to date. While I have a lot of fun with the incorporation of kink, erotica, and brow-raising relationship dynamics in her other work, The Night Mark is love pure and simple. Imagine finding your one true love in a different time: a love nearly identical to the one you lost and grieve in the present. See? It was lovely, beautifully romantic, and soul-cleansing, and this novel was well worth the wait.
In an effort to provide a well-rounded and honest review, I must note that the flow of this story felt a bit choppy which caused some distraction within my personal reading experience. I wish I could be more specific but that is the adjective that comes to mind. Obviously, when a character is jumping between two time frames, that element is going to feel abrupt but I think this was something else. On a positive note, both time frames in this novel incorporate the ocean (which is my favorite place to be in the world!) and Ms. Reisz excelled at using her descriptive voice:
“…I always feel like a better person when I’m on the water. The air smelled cleaner here. The water seemed purer. She wanted to strip off her clothes and dive off the side of the boat and let the water baptize her a free woman.”
The Night Mark’s heroine was wonderfully modern, Ms. Reisz gifted us once again with her classic humor, environmental factors were showcased as well as the pros and cons of living in each time period, and fans of The Bourbon Thief will recognize a name or two in this one 😉
Check it out!
My favorite quote:
“When people lost hope, they looked in the last place they remembered having it, and it was always in the past. Maybe someday they’d stop looking to the past to find their hope and start looking at one another, where hope really lived.”