The Courting of Bristol Keats (The Courting of Bristol Keats, #1)

by Mary E. Pearson

Our past is a shadow that follows us. For better or worse, it shapes us, and sometimes it controls us.

It was impossible to move forward when part of you was trapped in the past.

Life wasn’t always about change but sometimes about sameness. And sometimes sameness made you look beneath the surface, look at the bones that held it all together—and the flaws that could be its undoing. Change was a distraction. Sameness demanded reflection.

But she was a student of art, and architecture was art as much as paintings, sculpture, books, or anything else. It was the product of history, fashion, politics, dreams, and imagination. It revealed people, both living and dead. Purpose and pleasure were its mortar.

“She smells books before she reads them. Every time. It’s strange, I know. And she buys a lot of used books.”

But now she was in a Boschian nightmare, painted onto a canvas of monsters and demons, and her mother was one of them.

Forgiveness is a thing of the heart, and every heart is wounded and mended in its own way.”