I recently bought a new kindle after my old one broke. For some reason I was unable to download this title from the cloud onto my kindle, therefore I will be unable to review this title. I am sorry for any inconvenience caused.

Good book. Good author. Loved the characters and the plot. Look forward to reading more of her work.

The Valentine House surprised me. Having read Emma Henderson’s first novel, Grace Williams Says It Loud, in 2011, I had expected this new one, her second, to be something similar. Instead, what I found was something completely different. Grace Williams was a moving, thought-provoking story of a young girl in a 1950s mental institution; The Valentine House is probably best described as a family saga set in the French Alps.

The house referred to in the title is Arete, a large chalet in the mountains overlooking the village of Hext. It was built by a British mountaineer, Sir Anthony Valentine, in the 19th century and is used as a summer home by successive generations of his family. Our story begins in 1914 when Mathilde, a teenage girl from a farm in the valley, goes to work for the Valentines. Mathilde is an ‘Ugly’, the term given to the unattractive young women who make up Arete’s workforce, specially chosen by Sir Anthony’s wife, Lady C, as being less likely to catch her husband’s eye. Spending her summers at the house, Mathilde gets to know the Valentine family, particularly Daisy, a girl the same age as herself who becomes gradually wilder and more unstable as the years go by.

Decades later, in the summer of 1976, Sir Anthony’s great-great-grandson George is visiting Arete with several of his cousins. Even though Sir Anthony is long gone, his legacy lives on in the Alpine Club which he created to entertain the younger members of the family, and George and his cousins continue to carry out Club activities such as the outdoor physical challenges known as ‘Paideia’. Mathilde is still there too, an elderly woman now, but as much a part of Arete life as she has ever been.

The Valentine House is a dual time period novel: a chapter set in 1976 and written from George’s perspective is followed by one narrated by Mathilde and set earlier in the century. Eventually the two begin to converge and secrets which have been kept hidden from the reader (and from some of the characters) start to be revealed. What is the truth behind the disappearance of Margaret, Sir Anthony’s daughter, whose visits to Arete came to an abrupt stop many years ago? Mathilde is sure that if she could only find out what happened to Margaret everything else that has puzzled her about the Valentines would begin to make sense. Although some of the plot twists and revelations could probably be predicted, I didn’t even try to guess – I just relaxed and let the story take me in whichever direction it wanted to go, which meant I was kept in suspense until the various Valentine mysteries started to unfold.

I did struggle at times to keep track of all the characters and how they were related to each other. This is probably not surprising, as there are five generations of the family featured in the novel; drawing a simple family tree helped to solve the problem, although I wish I’d had the sense to do it at the beginning of the book instead of when I was already halfway through!

I think what I loved most about The Valentine House was the setting; I haven’t been to the area of France described in the book – the Haute-Savoie – but I would like to as Emma Henderson makes it sound beautiful. And this is a good place for me to mention that Sir Anthony himself has a unique way of describing the Alpine mountains and valleys, which you’ll discover in the opening paragraph of the novel. If you find that the language he uses makes you blush, don’t worry – this does not reflect the style of writing throughout the rest of the book!

Although I found both threads of the story very enjoyable, it usually seems to be inevitable with dual timeline novels that readers will have a preference for one storyline over the other and in my case it was the one narrated by Mathilde. And it was Mathilde whose story lingered on in my mind for days after finishing the book.

Now I’m wondering what Emma Henderson’s third book will be about. I hope there’s going to be one!

In the mid-19th century Anthony Valentine visited a small valley in the Haut-Savoie and fell in love. An avid mountaineer and outdoorsman he built a huge family house on the mountain above the village of Hext which the extended family used every summer, exploring the area and entertaining. Whilst the locals did not like 'les Rosbifs', the money that they family brought into the area was useful. In 1914 Mathilde joined the workforce, a household help known as an 'Ugly', the family only employed unattractive local girls as Lady C felt that they would not catch the eye of her husband. In 1976 George spends the summer at the house following the data of his parents and the stories of the locals and the family become more intertwined and secrets are revealed.

I am not always a fan of these 'family saga' novels but I really enjoyed this one. Henderson has a real love for the Haut-Savoie and it is the area that is both the hero and villain of the tale. The romanticism of the Alpine Club and the idea of the challenges fits in with the upper class ideals, as does the delineation between upstairs and downstairs. There is a lot of plot crammed in here and not all of it is explored as fully as it could have been, by keeping the setting solely in the area around the house the story of Margaret and her scandal is rather underplayed until the very end of the book. Similarly I found the story of Xavier rushed towards the end. However that is to detract from what is a very entertaining read which switches timeframe and narrator with ease.