The Story She Left Behind - Patti Callahan Henry - ★★

AUTHOR: Patti Callahan Henry

GENRE: Historical Fiction

PUBLICATION DATE: March 18, 2025

RATING: 2 stars.

In a Nutshell: A historical mystery about a daughter searching for clues about her lost mother’s manuscript. Everything in the blurb made this book sound perfect for me. Alas! Insta-romance, convenient plotting, overly slow pacing in the second half, lacklustre historical feels, unsatisfactory finish. The lyrical prose helps, but prose alone doesn’t make a book for me. I’m so disappointed! Outlier review yet again.

Plot Preview: (I have gone much beyond the initial 10-15% of the book in this preview because there’s hardly anything happening at the start. No major spoilers though.)

1952. Clara is an award-winning illustrator. A single mother, she lives with her father and her eight-year-old daughter Wynnie in South Carolina. Over the last twenty-five years, Clara has lived under the emotional shadow of her missing mother Bronwyn, a renowned author who disappeared off the coast with no clue and leaving behind a sequel to her bestseller. This sequel is written in an invented language no one can decipher. Now a stranger named Charlie calls up Clara from London, claiming that he has found a handwritten dictionary of the lost language. Though Clara is sceptical and can barely afford a trip across the ocean, she travels with Wynnie to London, only to arrive at the same time as a deadly smog engulfs the place. Charlie has a solution: escaping to his family country house in the beautiful Lake District. Is Charlie’s claim about the dictionary true? Will Clara finally find closure?

The story comes to us in the third-person perspectives of Clara and Charlie.

Bookish Yays:

😍 The story is set in three locations in a linear order: South Carolina, London, and Lake District. Each of these is described beautifully.

😍 The details about the Great Fog of 1952. How funny that until a month ago, I hadn’t even heard of this fog, and within a month, this is the second book I've read that uses the London fog as a key development, the other being ‘A Dangerous Game’ by Mandy Robotham! Both books use the fog nicely but differently, with this one stressing more on the pollutants and poisonous stench. The foggy feels come out well.

😍 The author’s note at the end revealing several factual elements connected to the plot, including details about real-life author Barbara Newhall Follett, whose early publishing success and mysterious disappearance in 1939 at age twenty-five – considered one of the biggest literary mysteries of the twentieth century – inspired this fictional novel. I found this note more interesting than the book itself.

Bookish Mixed Bags:

🤔 The start is really good. The prologue coming from 1927 in Bronwyn’s perspective, the initial chapters abut Clara’s life in South Carolina, and Charlie’s discovery of the dictionary are all interesting. Things start to dip after the story shifts the Lake District, where it seems like the purpose of the narrative has changed.

🤔 The novel has some really beautiful prose that brings the locations and emotions alive. However, it also feels like too much of a good thing, especially when the prose isn't supported by an equally strong plot.

🤔 Wynnie is a sweet child, I agree. But it’s getting tiresome to see fictional children who don’t speak as per their age and are mature way beyond their years, with this behaviour conveniently being attributed to precocity.

🤔 The novel contains some strong themes such as parental abandonment, grief, mental health issues, marital breakdown, gambling, child’s health issues, death, and divorce. However, most of these are explored only at the surface level. Some aren’t even utilised properly in the core plot.

🤔 Though the story is set in 1952, it hardly ever *felt* historical. Except for the modes of transportation and the fog/Churchill references, the rest could have been from any time period. I’m not sure why it felt so generic.

Bookish Nays:

😒 I didn’t find the characters well-developed. Many of their actions are impulsive and irrational. Clara’s actions were idiotically naïve at times. (Imagine taking your asthmatic child to a museum on foot in a new city engulfed in so much fog that you can’t see more than a couple of metres ahead of you!)

😒 Charlie is a good-hearted bloke. But even this doesn’t justify the establishing of a romantic relationship within just ten days!! And why was the romance needed anyway? Wasn’t this the story of a daughter looking for closure on her missing mother?

😒 Why does the blurb have two detailed notes from two timelines when the actual plot contains only one timeline? Except for the prologue set in 1927, the rest is all from 1952. Not gonna lie, I felt cheated. I truly expected a dual timeline, with the other one coming from Bronwyn’s POV, which would have been so interesting.

😒 The book keeps stressing on the “secret language” created by Bronwyn. Sorry to be a party-pooper, but its implementation wasn't convincing to me. This supposedly mysterious language, compared in the plot to what Tolkien created for his books, was utterly basic. Plus, we get only a few words from this “language” throughout this book, and for most of them, the meaning is quite guessable. (What’s so complicated about deciphering words such as “Miraculum” and “Adorium”?) It felt like the plot was trying to hype this up, but it didn’t succeed.

😒 There are hints of magical realism, but these aren’t fully explored. Why have it then?

😒 The pacing is quite slow, but in the Lake district sequences, it drags like anything. I struggled to keep my concentration in the second half.

😒 Everything in the book, from character actions to events to emotions, feels farfetched. All reactions are melodramatic, and all conversations include secret-keeping. Some of the subplots aren’t even utilised well, but possibly retained only for their dramatic value.

😒 The mystery itself is boring and the resolution also isn't too tough to figure out. The actual revelation, whenever it comes, is even more disappointing.

😒 The ending – so, so disappointing! An extended infodump lasting almost 15% of the book leading to an overly smooth and convenient finish. Some books work better with HFN endings than with HEA endings. This plot needed an HFN.

😒 The infodump contains certain details that are so absurd and unbelievable! All my sympathy for that character vanished after that infodump. It was more annoying than anything else.

All in all, while this book began really well for me, the rest of it, especially the second half, was quite a frustrating journey. I could empathise with neither the characters nor their quandary. Had the romance not been such a priority and the focus had stayed more on the two mother-daughter pairs (Bronwyn-Clara and Clara-Wynnie), I might have liked this a tad better.

Then again, all my GR friends have rated this novel 5 or 4 stars. So I am very clearly the outlier. I have read only one other book by this author prior to this: ‘Once Upon a Wardrobe’ and I was an outlier for that as well. So perhaps this author and I aren’t meant for each other. 😥 Please read the other reviews and take a more informed call on this book.

Recommended to those who love extended lyrical prose and romance tracks and don’t mind slowburn pacing and melodrama. None of these is for me.

My thanks to Atria Books for providing the DRC of “The Story She Left Behind” via NetGalley. This review is voluntary and contains my honest opinion about the book. Sorry this didn’t work out better.