The Glass House by Eve Chase is a captivating historical mystery that spans two timelines and explores family secrets, identity and belonging.
The author weaves together the stories of four women who are connected by a mysterious glass house in the forest and a tragic event that happened there in 1971.

Atmospheric, descriptive and engaging, the characters are well-developed, complex and realistic, each with their own struggles and secrets.

The Glass House by Eve Chase is a highly recommended read for fans of historical fiction, mystery and drama.

This book was filled with excellent characters and was on the whole well written.
I really enjoyed it until about 2/3s of the way through. I felt that the author had too many storylines going and the ending felt very confusing

I don’t know why i left this book so long but it was so enjoyable. Lots of twists and turns and i loved how the present and future merged together

A beautiful read with so many mysteries and side stories built in to it that I began to question if it was possible to wrap it all up. But it turned out it was and it had a very satisfying and well written ending

Loved the character of 'Big' Rita, the mystery of the foundling child and they way it all tied together at the end.

Brilliant book. To be honest, I enjoy anything Eve Chase writes, she is one of my favourite authors. I love how she mixes the mysterious of the past with the present day and you see so many different perspectives. There are always so many twists that have you audibly gasping. Just brilliant!

This was a brilliant read and is being featured on my blog for my quick star reviews feature, which I have created on my blog so I can catch up with all the books I have read and therefore review.
See www.chellsandbooks.wordpress.com.

Have you ever wondered if you belong to your family? Or drawn to places and you are not sure why?
This book has a great storyline and compels you to read more.
I enjoyed this from start to finish. Definitely for fans of Kate Morton.

I read this book for a local village book club but was intrigued as it was selected as a Richard and Judy read.

I purposely did not read the synopsis of the book so that I did not have any pre conception of the plot and what may happen.

The Glass House focuses on a dysfunctional family of Jeannie and her two children Hera and Teddy who are banished by the head of the family, Walter to a summer in Devon along with the nanny 'Big Rita'. Jeannie has lost a baby (following an affair with Walter's best friend Don) and Walter has sent them away to try and put physical distance between the pair while he is working away.

Jeannie is in a pit of post natal depression after the death of her third child and leaves much of the child raising to Rita, who along with a local Marge look after the children during the summer days.

The narrative splits then to follow 'Sylvie' and 'Annie' a woman and daughter who are coming to terms with Annie's unexpected pregnancy. Sylvie (mum) is coming to terms with a divorce from Annie's dad and how that may affect her relationship with her daughter and coping with her mum being in hospital extremely poorly.

The characters are diverse, well rounded and some you root for and others you despise - always a good indication of a well thought story! I enjoyed the setting of the wood and it's gloom / haunting aspects of danger, yet it being a cocoon from the realities of the outside world.

When Don arrives at the house they are staying in though, the 'glass house' starts to crumble, a new born baby is found in the woods, someone is found killed from a gunshot wound in the woods and life won't ever be the same for the family.

I liked the fact that the threads of all the characters got resolved and without resorting to cliches.

An interesting, enjoyable story.

Loved the characters, all very interesting. Loved the mother/daughter bonds in both time lines. Such a dark story which tied up all a bit too nicely at the end. One big happy family. Though that might be me, I do seem to have a problem with book endings. Not often completely satisfied. Apart from that I really enjoyed it.

Thank you to Netgalley for an advanced copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Loved it-beautifully written telling the special bond between mother and daughter. A good mystery with some great twists. Recommended.

This is a book written with two storylines, one in the present and one from 1971. You know they must join up but you don't know how until almost the end. The story is told from three perspectives, Rita and Hera from before and Sylvie from the present. The book is very good at keeping you guessing as to where the leads go.
In 1971 Rita is nanny to two young children and a dysfunctional mother, Jeannie, who move to an old country Manor House after they are forced to leave their London home following a fire and the loss of a baby. Fate seems to shine on them when they discover an abandoned baby in the forest which they decide to keep. Jeannie does not have the best of marriages partly as she is obsessed with a lothario who is out for whatever he can get.
The story twists and turns until the last. Then there is the terrarium, the garden under glass, which lingers in the background, a link to the past and present

A good story but it jumped back and forth making it confusing at times and having to go back and re-read to understand where we are now.

I found the POV's of this story quite lack luster with little intrigue. I liked the connections between the characters but that was the extent of my interest. I felt there was often a lot of extra things added in simply for shock factor or to over complicate things and it felt unnecessary to me.

The Glass House is a decades-spanning story about women’s secrets and complicity; about motherhood and mothering, and the distinction between the two.

The story is told mainly in two threads: Rita, nanny to a troubled family in 1971, and Sylvie, dealing with her marriage breakup and the subsequent estrangement from her daughter in the present day (with some brief glimpses into other character’s perspectives, such as teenage Hera in 1971).

It is clear from the outset that the two disparate threads will converge at some point, but how and when is a complete mystery. Which mirrors the many other mysteries in the story, such as what happened to Jeannie’s baby; why Hera and Teddy are so unsettled; why Rita avoids romantic entanglements; and where did the baby in the woods come from. And, of course, whose is the dead body that appeared days later, and who killed them?

The story starts a little slowly, but the reader is soon drawn in to the rich inner world of the characters – that heavy summer oppression of secrets and lies – and the plot twists and turns, with clever foreshadowing and fateful coincidences, until finally the story comes together in a satisfyingly dramatic, and yet hopeful finale. But the real focus here is the characters. Party to their intimate thoughts and feelings, I found myself totally immersed in what really happened at Foxcote Manor, and whether Rita, Jeannie, Hera, Teddy, Robbie, Sylvie and Annie can all find some form of happiness from the tangled mess woven around them.

This is a story of family and secrets, the lengths we would be willing to go to for those we love and what it means to be a mother. And how those last two might be inextricably linked.



A glass conservatory shrunk to finger-doll size, Rita’s terrarium is the only possession she cares about. The only thing she owns that has no practical purpose. On the night of the fire, after tugging Jeannie and the children down the smoky stairs in the dark, she’d tried to return for it, but the blazing heat beat her back. She rescued it the day she went to get the baby’s things. It was like reuniting with an old friend, a dear silent companion. Housing the most perfect mossy rock and among other plants, a maidenhair fern she’s named Ethel and another she’s grown from a tiny black spore (Dot), the terrarium is the one constant between her unlikely nanny’s life, and Life Before.

– Eve Chase, The Glass House


Review by Steph Warren of Bookshine and Readbows blog

This story takes place in a forest and I could smell the humus rich soil, see the ferns, hear the rustlings of small mammals and imagine the blending of shadows and sunlight. In ‘The Glass House’ by Eve Chase, the mysterious happenings in a forest have ramifications across the decades. Shame, deceit, secrets and love are bound-up together in a group of people whose lives are coloured forever by what happened in the Forest of Dean in 1971.
When nanny Big Rita drives her boss’s wife, Jeannie Harrington and Jeannie’s two children Hera and Freddy to their country house in the West of England, they enter a different world. Leaving behind Jeannie’s husband Walter at their sugar-white stucco house in Primrose Hill, and her own unhappy memories, Rita is cautious about the mysterious forest with its rustling noises and the feeling of being watched. She spends every hour with the children while Jeannie, recovering after the loss of a baby, spends her time in bed. And then Hera finds a baby girl abandoned in the woods. This is the catalyst for a number of things happening at once, things that upset the status quo and challenge Rita’s place in the Harrington family and what she wants for her own life. Most disturbing to her equilibrium is local woodsman Robbie Rigby.
The second timeline is set now and is told by Sylvie who has just left her husband and moved into a flat beside a canal in Kensal Town. Sylvie is taking time to find her feet away from husband Steve and teenage daughter Annie who is staying with her grandmother beside the sea in Devon. But two incidents quickly challenge Sylvie’s perceptions about what actually matters to her.
And there is a delicious hint in the short Prologue – a report in a Gloucestershire newspaper in 1971 about a body found in the forest near Foxcote Manor.
I found the structure slightly messy with varying pace which at times was rather slow. I was longing for some connections to be made so the story could move on. Looking back at my review of Chase’s ‘The Vanishing of Audrey Wilde’, I made a similar comment. The last scenes seemed to tie up loose ends rather too quickly and neatly in comparison with the earlier speed of the story, but that’s just my personal preference. Eve Chase writes a great sense of place; Foxcote Manor seems a real house set in a real forest.
As Robbie explains to Rita, ‘when a giant tree crashes down in a forest, light and air rush into the cleared space, dormant seeds flower, and new life scrambles up, taking its chance.’ That’s basically what happens to the people in ‘The Glass House’.
Incidentally, the glass house mentioned in the title, and featured on the lovely cover, refers to a terrarium. Rita owns one in 1971 and her care of the plants living in it – she gives them names – mirrors her care of the two children, but also symbolises the fragility and transparency of the lives of the Harrington family at Foxcote Manor.
Read more of my book reviews at http://www.sandradanby.com/book-reviews-a-z/

I received an ARC of this novel in exchange for an honest review. Thank you to NetGalley, Penguin UK, and the author Eve Chase.
A solid mystery thriller, but nothing too groundbreaking. Good for a holiday read! 3.5 stars.

When tragedy strikes, the Harrington family escape to the wilds of the Forest of Dean and a house hidden in the trees, Foxcote Manor. Here they hope to shrug off the memory of the fire, the loss and devastation that gripped them in London. But escape is not so easy. Jeannie, wife and mother to two children, is withdrawn, riddled with grief and nothing can mend her wounds. Hera and Teddy are lost, searching for their mother, relying on their beloved live-in nanny, Rita, to care for them in this strange time of unrest.

When thirteen-year-old Hera finds a baby in the woods, she thinks it will be a balm for her wearied mother, a way of drawing her back to herself, of uniting her family. And for a brief period of time it is. They are happy, the past exactly that, the past, it can do no harm. But soon a tragedy of a new nature will strike and the Harrington Family will be beyond reprieve or hope of happiness.

Sylvie Broom is a struggling make-up artist with an eighteen year old daughter and a crumbling marriage. Her life, a moment ago, ordered and neat, is now in disarray. Taking courage, she leaves her unfaithful husband and begins anew, new place, new life, next chance. Then her mother is taken to hospital, in a coma, and Slyvie begins to question her childhood, the secrets she has always known were there but never dared unravel. When she was a girl, her mother avoided her questions, through fear or guilt, she did not know. But now that past and those dark secrets are rumbling, rising to the surface.

The Glass House is gorgeous mystery/family drama that alternates between two time periods, the 1970s and present day. Written with emotive prose and twisty plot, it snatches the reader up and steals them away to the Forest of Dean, where a body is unearthed and secrets that are decades old, come to light. I loved the author’s descriptions of the setting, of Foxcote and the surrounding woodland. It’s deliciously thrilling and unnerving. The characters are emotionally complex, with secrets that twist them up and connect the two narratives beautifully. I got utterly lost in this delicious, layered mystery.

The Glass House is fabulous. It’s the perfect read for these strange times. Escape to the Forest of Dean and marvel at the unraveling of one family’s dark secrets.

Rita gets a job as Nanny to a family of 4 soon to be 5 in london. She is excited to be away from her Devon upbringing and in the more Cosmopolitan London. nothing is plainly straight forward. Rita has a back story that affects the person she is both to herself and in the eyes of others. Her adopte family have far from a straight forward life and she is dragged from an urban to a more countirifed setting.

I loved some of the characters particularly Big Rita nad Hera - some of the others are purposefiully less developed.Set between two time periods - 1971 and the present day- it is difficult to examine the latter without giving away the premise of the narrative.

As with many books of this genre the reader is constantly trying to fit pieces of the jigsaw together. Foe me this was easier to do for parts of this storyline than others. Some links were extremely well signposted whilst others remained unlockable.

For me there was just a little too much discernable in the reading of the book for it to be a real mystery.

Eve Chase has a gift for spinning stories, bringing characters to life, and making glorious houses live and breathe.

This book begins with a report of the discovery of a body deep in a forest, and then comes the house.

<I>Behind a tall rusting gate, Foxcote manor erupts from the undergrowth, as if a geological heave has lifted it from the woodland floor. A wrecked beauty, the old house’s mullioned windows blink drunkenly, in the stippled evening sunlight. Colossal trees overhang a sweep of red-tiled roof that sags in the middle, like a snapped spine, so the chimney’s tilt at odd angles. Ivy suckers up the timber and brick-gabled facade, dense, bristling, alive with dozens of tiny darting birds, a billowing veil of bees … </I>

That house is the focus of three entwined narratives, two from the past and one from the presents, telling a story of mothers and daughters, of love and loss, and of history and its consequences.

Rita came to Foxcote, that wonderful country home, as the nanny of two children whose family who had just suffered a terrible trauma. She wasn’t entirely happy about that, as becoming a nanny to a wealthy family in London had been her dream job, but she loved her charges and she know that they needed her, more than every now that their mother was mentally frail.

She was a city girl but she came to love the country.

The father of the family had to stay in London, his request that she send him regular reports made her uncomfortable, and what was happening to his wife and children – especially when one particular person visited – gave her serious cause for concern.

Another voice from the past filled out the story, speaking of things that Sylvie didn’t see or know.
Years later, Sylvie was making plans to leave her husband. They were calling it a trial separation, but she knew that they had drifted apart and that it was time for a permanent change.

She felt positive about the future, but her plans had to be put on hold when a terrible accident left her usually bright and active mother in a comma. Her daughter’s reaction to that was not what she expected, Sylvie suspected that something was very wrong, because that had always been very close and they always talked about anything and everything.

I was captivated by both stories, past and present. Because the characters and relationships were so beautifully drawn that they lived and breathed, that they drew me in and made me care and want to know what would happen. Because the writing was so rich and evocative that the I felt that I really knew the times and places that the story visited.

At first there was nothing to indicate what would tie the stories together, but hints and facts were dropped in a way that was quite perfectly judged, until I knew and understood everything.

I wish that I could stop there, but I can’t.

The early chapters were perfect, but as time went on I worried that two serious incidents in the story set in the past would be difficult to resolve. The plot, beautifully constructed though it was, took the lustre from the characters and the relationships. They needed space to shine, but they were weighed down and stretched too far by an excess of story.

I was able to keep faith for most of the book, but I found that in the later chapters I couldn’t help feeling that the author spoilt her own story by trying to account for everything and everyone, and by tying the story set it the past and the story set in the present together much, much too tightly.

That is why, though I found much to love in this book, though it never lost its hold on me, I couldn’t love it as much as I hoped I would, or as much as I loved Eve Chase’s last book.

I hope that this wasn’t a sign that the author isn’t running out of ideas for this type or book, that she isn’t trapped in a niche or under pressure to come up with new ideas to quickly. I hope that this is just a mis-step.

Maybe it was the literary equivalent of an artist who doesn’t know when to put her brush down. I say that because I love the pictures that this book painted, but I need to stand back and not look too closely at some of the details.