I love Julianne Maclean's books and this is another really good one. Growing up on Sable Island was a unique experience for Emma Clarkson, way different than the typical city or suburb experience. She dreams of attending college in Halifax to study psychology. Just after WWII in 1946, a shipwreck changes the course of her life. She falls in love with Captain Oliver Harris of the downed ship, but their romance is forever complicated. When Oliver leaves to go back to England, Emma tries really hard to move on. She meets and falls in love with an adorable veterinarian who came to Sable Island to study the wild horses, but she soon finds out that he has some deep, dark secrets. The story progresses to 1995 with Joanna Griffin learning about her grandfather's past with Emma. She travels to Canada to learn more about this mystery woman. This is a beautifully-written story of love and dreams and the obstacles that get in their way. I recommend it and look forward to Julianne Maclean's next book. Thanks to #netgalley #lakeunionpublishing and #juliannemaclean for this ARC in exchange for an honest review.

All Our Beautiful Goodbyes by Julianne Maclean is a beautiful and intriguing historical fiction that I really enjoyed.

Set on Sable Island, a small island southeast of Halifax, Nova Scotia.

The story is divvied into 3 parts, which I really enjoyed this format.

The characters were complex and well fleshed out. I appreciated the relationship between Emma and her father.

I was honestly not expecting that twist at all; my jaw was dropping.

Highly recommend!

All Our Beautiful Goodbyes by Julianne Maclean Review by Shirley Weidner 12-21-24

What a wonderful, intriguing Historical novel! Founded in fact on Sable Island, a lonely, little island 186 miles southeast of Halifax, Nova Scotia in the North Atlantic Ocean. Emma, the protagonist, is an only child whose mother died in childbirth. Emma’s father is superintendent of Sable Island and is responsible for helping shipwrecked survivors, found off the coast of the island. It is a small community with 2 lighthouses, a telegraph station and the lifesaving patrol.

On May 8, 1946, Emma is now 21, and helping her Dad and the crew, who were called to rescue a stranded merchant ship, the Belvedere. Captain Oliver Harris is experienced from WW11, but the 52 ft. waves have pushed the ship off course. The captain has need of wounds healed physically and emotionally. Emma is drawn to him and helps him in recovery. A friendship has begun.

There are three sections of this story beautifully written by Julianne Maclean. Her character development is excellent, and I really enjoy her style of writing. She develops the many reasons that the Sable Island is a lovely place with drifting sand, roses, unusual grasses and wild horses. There is a twist three fourths of the way through! I read the novel in 3 days! I highly recommend this novel you won’t regret reading it!

I received a free advanced copy of this book from Net Galley. This is my honest review.

An epic tale of love. On the windswept Sable Island off the coast of Nova Scotia post war, Emma is ready to go out into the world. She dreams of college on the mainland. When Captain Oliver Harris is literally shipwrecked on the island, she falls in love. Fate has other plans. Oliver must leave with his crew and she still has college. When her father’s health turns for the worse, she stays and finds new love. But not all love is the same and Oliver is never far from her mind.

Later, Joanna realizes her grandfather loved someone named Emma in his youth. She talks him into going back to Sable Island. Old love and new love collide in the most beautiful way.

This book is a beautiful and heartfelt love story. The story is set in Nova Scotia beginning in the year 1946 with a young lady Emma.
Emma meets her first love on Sable Island. She is a strong, loving, caring young woman.
There are many events that occur and challenge her life and her dreams. It’s a story of family, heart ache, and many goodbyes.
Julianne once again takes you on a journey that is incredibly amazing. A must read!

While this book started out slow for me, it didn’t take long before I was completely drawn into this story. I found myself thinking about the characters, especially Emma, before I was able to continue reading. This story was both heartbreaking and redeeming. Without giving away too much, Emma proves to be a very strong and resilient young woman, despite her challenges with the men she has relationships with. I highly recommend this book!!
I do also love all of the research that Julianne does for her novels, which makes them quite fascinating.

This is a beautiful book about Sable Island, a fictional island in the cold, Canadian east coast. Emma Clarkson grows up on this small island with her dad and a handful of others on this island and eventually meets a British sea captain that ends up on the island when his ship sinks. He and his crew are mended and eventually leave, but not before Emma falls in love with the sea captain.
Things are not to be for Emma, however, and Emma finds love with a veterinarian who comes to the island. From there, there are many missed opportunities for Emma and the sea captain to get together, with a surprising twist at the end. This is another beautifully written book by Julianne MacLean, which had me researching the real island the book was based on and the history of the surrounding shores.
Thank you NetGalley for a ARC.

It is a good book and I will recommend it. I just thought for me that part of it was predictable and then part of it was a little like…huh? The storyline was fairly interesting- the part about Sable Island was very interesting and almost fascinating. The characters were somewhat believable but I found Emma to be a bit flighty. It was interesting enough that I finished it and am glad I did. Thank you to NetGalley and Lake Union for allowing me to read an advance copy for my honest review.

Thank you NetGalley and Lake Union Publishing for the eARC.
This was such an enjoyable book so that it was hard to stop reading; I finished it too quickly and wanted more!
The setting, the characters, the love found and lost; everything about this story was so heartwarming. And I loved reading the parts about the horses and so relieved they are allowed to stay on the island without being rounded up and sold on the mainland!
The dual timelines worked really well ... it gave the book a satisfying ending and made me feel happy.
I'm generally not a reader of the romantic genre, but am so glad that I had the chance to read this.

If you are a fan of historical fiction, alternate timelines, gentle love stories, and even cozy mysteries, this book is for you. The book manages to be heartbreaking yet heartwarming, charming yet down-to-earth, and captivating yet a slow burn all at once. It’s a book of loss, longing, reflection, and discovery. The author does a lovely job painting the scenes, exploring the settings, and exposing the personal nuances of the characters. All Our Beautiful Goodbyes by Julianne MacLean is simply the lovely story of a secluded young woman who matures not a strong woman as she makes past discoveries and learns from mistakes made in the past and the present.

All Our Beautiful Goodbyes by Julianne MacLean is a book I didn't want to stop reading. Set on the beautiful Sable Island, it is a tale of youth, love, loss, growth, and deep soul longing. Our main female character Emma lives on Sable Island with her father. She is young, hopeful, and excited to begin her studies at university. In 1946, there was a shipwreck along the shores of her island. This propels the older, handsome, and captivating Captain Oliver Harris into her life. She becomes infatuated with the Captain, but things don't work out quite the way she envisions and she ends up heartbroken.

This book features a time jump to 1995 when a young woman named Joanna is grieving over her grandmother. She is shocked to discover that her grandfather fell in love with another woman on Sable Island long ago, but they were separated by lies, bad timing, and miscommunication. Joanna is fascinated by the story and decides to learn all she can about Sable Island and the young woman her grandfather loved so long ago.

I loved this book. It is full of longing, passion, and real-life events that made my heart ache. The author does an amazing job describing the inner turmoil of the main characters. I felt Emma's yearning and heartache and the Captain's hesitancy as well as his longing for her. I didn't want the book to end. I also loved the descriptions of the island and the horses. They seemed to come alive on the pages.

Thank you to Lake Union Publishing for providing this book for review consideration via NetGalley. All opinions are my own.

Despite being an easy, one-sit read, ALL OUR BEAUTIFUL GOODBYES was a novel full of disappointments. I loved the premise - post war Canada, an isolated island, the promise of love torn apart. But sadly the execution of the plot fell flat, and it seemed to be too melodramatic to be a good read. I was engrossed enough to want to read until the end, but bitterly disappointed all the same. The best parts were the narration on Sable Island, the horses - and props to the author for the way she managed to create a story out of a nugget from history - I just wish it had been done in a less rushed manner.

✰ 2.75 stars ✰

“Sometimes we have to choose one path over another, and live with that choice, and be happy with it.”

‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ When Captain Oliver Harris', British naval ship Belvedere capsized on the shores of Sable Island, twenty-one-year-old aspiring psychologist Emma felt that she had met the love of her life. Despite the many obvious reasons for them not to be together, she felt a certainty in her heart that he was the one. But, life and love often do not go hand in hand; and when they don't they stir up colder feelings and crueler heartbreaks and hopeful attempts to sooth the loneliness of a broken heart. ❤️‍🩹❤️‍🩹 And when she meets twenty-eight-year-old Logan who arrives on their secluded island to write a paper on the wild horses, it is all she hopes to heal the sadness of a lost dream. But, even then, sometimes love and life have not yet entirely shown the hands that they have left to deal. 🪷

“What did she really know about life and relationships and the real trauma that people endured in other places in the world?”

‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ The journey that Emma's life takes is one of second chances, lost opportunities, and misguided dreams. It is about how we yearn for something - dream we can make a dream of our own, only to have another life play itself out. Emma desired to study psychology at college, but she also 'wanted so badly to be loved'. It is hard when the absence of certain chances of love makes it all the more desperate, if not hopeful that the first chance at love might be the only one, even if it is not a grand love. 🥺 And the mistakes she learns through the chances she takes with her heart shape her character into one who learns not to give her heart away so easily. She is a dreamer - an idealist at times, but she also perseveres - toughens herself not to fall for the promise of happiness, regardless of how she craves it. It is a heavy-hearted path - one paved with challenges that appear not in her control, but somehow, she unwittingly pays the price. Her strength of resolve is how she has to try and move on from it and make something of herself, even at the cost and loss of her own happiness. 🫶🏻🫶🏻

“Was this what it felt like to fall in love? A complete loss of emotional control?”

But, I'm gonna level with you. I was not a fan of the deliberate contrivances the author dealt Emma to make it impossible for her to have her happy ending. Perhaps it is an example that illustrates how life rarely works the way we wish - how fate is uncontrollable and we simply have to work to find a way to move on or how important it was to grab hold of happiness while you could, and hang on to it.' I was a bit uncomfortable with how it was always Emma's ill-timed, if not ill-planned romantic rendezvous with her lovers that had her life change course; it did not seem like a suitable, well, maybe for the time, it was - but it also portrayed her sense of character as a very romantic one, who did not really have a level-head, despite how eager she was to prove otherwise. 🤷🏻‍♀️ It just felt slightly manipulative to me; for her to make the same course of judgment, not once, but twice - ah, maybe I can forgive it to the time period, but it just made for a plot device that ran stale. 😮‍💨

“... as if he were continuing to live and breathe in that memory, in the exquisiteness of it all, the good and the bad—because it was life, part of the living, breathing world.”

The writing was pleasantly agreeable to some extent. I did like how certain scenes were portrayed, well-rounded characters that captured their personalities and resonated with the conflicts. The time jump, too - very abruptly handled. I would have liked to have eased into it, rather than suddenly be thrown into it. 😕 I did not feel like even the past was resolved before we jumped to the present in a way that carried such a bittersweet sadness of longing that even the ending did not bring closure. It was disheartening for me, but for others - maybe hopeful. For I believe that is the message that All Our Beautiful Goodbyes reminds us; that for all the lost years - 'that despite the pain, it was all beautiful' - there is still the other side lived that gives us something in return. Be it a balance of happiness or family or a cherishing a life lived well that shows us that not everything is entirely lost forever. 🥺

“It’s a record of lost souls, and a reminder of why we’re here. To provide safe sanctuary.”

The highlight of it all - Sable Island, a small Canadian island off the coast of Nova Scotia. I do love how the cover captures not only the beauty of it, but Emma's wistful longing of something more than just the life she had - to see the world and experience new things and achieve all that she knows she is capable of. 'Only then did she realize what an incredible sight it must be for someone who came from away.' 🌊 I also learned about the maritime responsibilities, I felt so much for the allure and the charm that this isolated island of keepers possessed; such richness, teeming with the magestic presence of nature and animal life of this magnetic pull that added to its - I would not say, enigma, but the beauty of it and why even being remote - the aura of mystery it exuded was one of seafarers who may be lost to it, but some are found from it, too. Having it set in the days of World War II also painted a vivid image of the tides of change to Emma and her father; how it is impossible to stop the passing of time, no matter how much we cling to what we hold dear. 🙏🏻

*Thank you to NetGalley for an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

Emma lives on Sable Island, a tiny, remote island off the coast of Canada, where government employees are stationed to provide rescue and care for victims of shipwrecks. When a ship runs aground, Emma is attracted to the handsome young captain.

This is a love story that begins just after the Second World War, and concludes 50 years later. I enjoyed reading about life and conditions on the island and the hardships faced by the inhabitants.

Emma dreams of going to university and studying to become a psychologist. Whilst she achieves her dream, we find out very little about this part of her life.

I received a free copy of this book via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

Thank you to NetGalley, Lake Union Publishing, and Julianne MacLean for this gifted e-ARC.

This novel is a sweeping tale of love, sacrifice, resilience, and the journey of self-discovery. MacLean beautifully weaves a dual timeline narrative that draws readers into two eras and connects two characters separated by nearly half a century.

In 1946, we meet Emma Clarkson, a young woman living on the remote and mystically rugged Sable Island. Known for its wild horses and infamous shipwrecks, the island offers Emma a life isolated from the world yet ripe with unfulfilled dreams. When British sea captain Olive Harris is rescued from a shipwreck, Emma's world is forever changed. The romance that unfolds is complicated and intense, and we see Emma as she grapples with dreams of leaving Sable Island to study psychology at Dalhousie University, balancing her ambitions with her ties to her father and island life.

Fast-forward to 1995, where Joanne Griffin learns of her grandfather’s heartbreak and unresolved love from decades past. Determined to reignite his passion for life, Joanne embarks on a journey to connect him with his forgotten past, opening doors to healing and unexpected revelations.

MacLean does a beautiful job exploring the inner lives of her characters. I felt deeply for Emma as she encountered the fragility of love and the weight of difficult choices. This novel paints a vivid picture of life on Sable Island in the 1940s and captures the wildness and remoteness of the landscape and its impact on the lives tethered there. The dual timelines blend seamlessly, creating a powerful story of intertwined destinies.

All Our Beautiful Goodbyes is an unforgettable read that celebrates the strength of the human spirit across generations. Fans of historical romance and richly atmospheric settings will find themselves completely immersed in this evocative tale.

For readers of Lucinda Riley, this is a must read book. I can't remember when I last read a novel that I did not want to end! Set on Sable Island (a small island off the coast of Novoa Scotia), it is a story of enduring love, missed opportunities and hdden secrets. Spanning from the 1940's to the present, we follow the two main characters as they navigate their life choices. The descriptions of the island are simply breathtaking, I am ready to go there right now. After finishing this, I read about the history of Sable Island and its inhabitants, fascinating read. This has to be one of my favorite books that I have read this year..

Thank you to Lake Union Publishing and NetGalley for the honor of reading and reviewing the ARC of this book.
All The Beautiful Goodbyes by Julianne MacClean is one of few book which not only shares the magic of love, but also, through the beauty of the written word, the glory of Sable Island. Sable Island is located in The Atlantic Ocean southeast of Halifax Nova Scotia and is known for its wild horses.
This book will take the reader on a ride of emotions which is what a good book does and I recommend it highly. Great and immersive story and gorgeous imagery makes for the perfect read. .

Maclean is one of my favorite authors. She had a way that she writes romance novels without making them sappy or over the top and draws you in to the story in a way you fall in love with the characters. I loved the setting and the Wild Horses. This is another winner for her
Thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for letting me review book

All Our Beautiful Goodbyes by Julianne MacLean. The story was wonderful filled with love, romance and joy. The story takes place on Sable Island. Emma and the Captain fall in love but circumstances prevent them marrying. I loved the wild horses on Sable Island. Read the story you will fall in love with Emma and the Captain.

I couldn’t put this one down. The story, set on Sable Island, drew me in and kept me guessing. A really interesting historical fiction/family saga with a touch of romance. I’m now eager to do my own research on the island. What a great setting for a book.

Thank you to NetGalley and Lake Union Publishing for the advanced copy.