The Last Letter of Rachel Ellsworth is the kind of book I count on reading written by Barbara O'Neal. Strong women at the heart of it but also a uniquely intriguing story as well. She has outdone herself with this novel. This is the story of travel companion, Veronica Barrington and injured Mariah Ellsworth who wishes to follow her late mother’s journey to find healing and some answered questions.

Wonderfully written with beautiful scenic descriptions. It is not a story of endings as much as it is a story of new beginnings. Such an emotional and intense story of the two women at different ages with different changes in their lives. The Last Letter of Rachel Ellsworth is women’s fiction at its best, highly recommend.

An absolutely fabulous premise, that unfortunately did not live up to its potential. I found the plot very difficult to follow and the characters lacked any sort of redeeming qualities-it was a chore to finish it.

Thanks to NetGalley for the e-Arc for an honest review. I really enjoyed this. The main character gets left by her long time husband and has to find a job and start over in life. She ends up helping a girl going on a trip to do research on a book her mother who died was working on. There’s some romance woven in and heart warming found family.

This was a great and entertaining read that I finished in a few hours.
A well written story that kept me hooked from the very beginning.
The characters draw you in and keeps you flipping the pages.
They are realistic and very well developed.
I really enjoyed the writing style. I found myself hooked, turning the pages.

Veronica is a middle-aged woman whose life was rocked by a sudden divorce. She has 3 grown children and is struggling to make ends meet.

Mariah is a young woman who was severely injured and is trying to rebuild her life after the loss of her mother, Rachel.

These two, very different women, travel to London, Paris, Morocco and India, re-tracing Rachel's steps and solving a mystery from years ago, in the process.

An older fellow, Henry, who is a father-figure to Mariah, joins them as a photographer to document their journey. He adds a nice touch to the story.

I have to say, I could relate to Veronica quite a lot, since I am much the same age as her and have some of the same issues with my kids. I don't think I would be brave enough to go to all those countries with someone I don't really know, although her doing so was the making of her. I found myself REALLY disliking Veronica's ex, so the author did a good job with his characterisation!

Fabulous story, and I enjoyed that the two women had such a personal growth journey as a result of their travels and their interactions with each other, even if it was hard to read sometimes as well.

4.5 stars from me.

Thank you to NetGalley and Lake Union Publishing.

I enjoyed all the travel and description in this book, as the author made you feel like you were right there with the characters throughout their adventures. However, for me, one of the main characters was so unlikable that I almost didn’t want to finish the book. Overall, a good read but not my favorite.

Wow! I really enjoy Barbara O'Neal and her stories. Veronica is going through a lot of trauma. Her husband of over 20 years trades her in for a younger model. She loses her fairy-tale life, struggles with money and abundant anger issues. Mariah deals with a harrowing event in her own life. The Mariah needs a companion on a overseas trip and Veronica needs a job. The two women, so different, yet both dealing with building new lives. As they travel to London, Paris, Marrakesh, and India, the women form a bond and unknowingly, help each other to overcome.

I loved this book. I could hardly put it down. Veronica's ex is a jerk and her children are doing nothing to help her. Mariah tries to deny her past and suffers PTSD. I love how the women learn about each other and themselves and they start this quest to complete Rachel's (Mariah's mother) book.

Great story, very engaging.

A heartfelt, beautifully written story about grief, healing, and connection. Veronica and Mariah’s journey guided by Rachel Ellsworth’s final lettersunfolds across stunning locations and rich food culture. I loved the emotional depth and the bond that grows between the women. While a late romantic subplot didn’t fully click for me, the overall message of finding purpose after loss was deeply moving. A lovely, soul-soothing read.

This was such a descriptive book. I felt like I was following Veronica, Mariah and Henry as they went from one eatery to the next. The food and drinks all sounded so good. It’s a bit of an emotional story, you can’t help but feel for both women. It’s another good book by this author.

Recently and abruptly divorced Veronica Barrington is anxious for a new direction when she answers a listing for a travel companion. It’s from Mariah Ellsworth, a young woman adjusting to an injury that ended her Olympic career. She’s also grieving her mother, Rachel, a lauded food writer, and Mariah aims to trace the steps of her mother’s final, unfinished project so she can heal and also honor the woman she misses.

Veronica seizes on the opportunity to experience with Mariah the culture, traditions, and intoxicating aromas of Parsi cafés throughout London, Paris, Morocco, and India. Accompanied by a former war photographer who has a wounded history of his own, and with just Rachel’s letters to guide them, the quest is a chance to not only close a chapter in life but also begin a new one.

Following the letters one by one—each a clue to an illuminating mystery—Veronica and Mariah must face the painful and beautiful challenges of freeing themselves from the dark shadows of the past. Together, far from home, they can find the light.

I think this is my third book by Ms. O'Neal and I don't think I have a favorite as they were all written beautifully. Your heart breaks and then mends for each character and while your crying, she sneaks in a twist or tidbit of information that keeps you guessing or wondering until the last page. In my opinion, Ms. O"Neal is the queen of book hangovers-you are spent and foggy but it was worth the fun!!

Thank you NetGalley and Lake Union Publishing for the ARC in exchange for my honest review.

Beautiful writing and captivating scenes are what really got me to like The Last Letter Of Rachel Ellsworth. ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Mariah and Veronica are dealing with different types of loss. Mariah recently lost her mother and is also dealing with an accident that left her with mobility issues. Veronica lost her home, her husband, and her family when he husband decided to leave her for a student.
Together, they embark on a beautiful journey of healing, friendship, learning how to cope, and identity. The atmosphere and the sites were breathtaking. Now Mariah and Veronica are very flawed, and they will annoy you, but that's their journey, and I was happy to be there right along.

Thank you, Netgalley and Lake Union Publishing, for this ARC. All opinions are entirely my own.

I received a complimentary copy of this book. Opinions expressed in this review are completely my own.
Wonderful author, well-written and beautiful. My heart broke for Mariah.

DNFd at 50 percent.

I thought I was going to love this - family drama, chosen family, people getting through adversity. Instead it became very repetitious, very quickly. The backstory is fed to the reader like a memory game - you know, the one where you sit in a circle and say "I went to the shop and got" and each player repeats all the previous items and adds one. The letters felt like quite artificial information dumps. To slow things down even further the characters are going to cafes (that is an important part of the plot) and then we read endlessly about what they ordered and what they ate. At 50 percent I remembered that finishing books is not compulsory. At that point it felt like I knew where the plot was going to go. I skipped to the end to see if it got twistier and found that, no it went exactly as I expected.

2.5 Stars

I read my first Barbara O'Neal book back in 2020, The Lost Girls of Devon , and I really enjoyed it, but The Last Letter of Rachel Ellsworth left me wanting something more. This story is about Veronica and Mariah. Veronica decides to be a travel companion for Mariah. Mariah was an Olympic hopeful until she had a career-ending injury. She also recently lost her mom, Rachel, who was a food reporter. Mariah wants to trace the steps of her mother's last culinary writing project.

This book was an adventure across the globe: Paris, London, Morocco, and India. Oh my! This is where O'Neal shines. Her descriptive writing of the setting and food had me right there with Veronica and Mariah. The part that didn't work for me was the fact that I was right there with Veronica and Mariah. Let me explain. Mariah was very hard to like; she seemed like a spoiled brat, even given the fact that she recently lost her mom and was injured in the same accident. I hate the way Veronica let her walk all over her. Veronica is also obsessed with her weight and nitpicks the food because of it, and that was a real downer. I also found the pacing to be a little on the slow side. We are dealing with this journey, and we also have Rachel's past unfolding. Then there were the supernatural parts with psychics, and that didn't sit well with me either. It just distracted from the main story and belittled the relationship part of the plot.

Overall, this was just an average read about new friendships, food, travel, and finding the strength to move on. It was very heartfelt and wonderfully written, but the slower pace and character flaws prevented it from being an exceptional book. I would recommend it to foodies, but the story itself fell short for me, as I was looking forward to a character study of the two female leads. I was going to rate it higher because I love books about found family, but the character flaws I mentioned ruined it for me.

This was such a gorgeous adventure.
I got was completely immersed in this story and the culture and the characters.
Two women embark on a journey, not knowing what they will find or where they will end up.
Wow. Absolutely blown away. Did not expect to love this the way I did. I could have done without the random ghost talk and mediums, but I loved everything else so much I chose to overlook it.
If you need an adventure in a book, pick this one up!

Mariah and Veronica are both dealing with grief. Mariah's mother Rachel was killed and her olympic dreams are gone thanks to a devastation injury so she decides to follow up on her mother's work by traveling the world to visit Parsi cafes. Veronica, reeling from a divorce, impulsively takes a job as her assistant. These women, different in age and perspectives come together to heal. They're accompanied by Henry, a photographer but the story is really about Mariah and Veronica. This has travel and foodie vibes. Thanks to Netgalley for the ARC. A good read.

This book took me by surprise and I thoroughly enjoyed following along with both Mariah and Veronica on their journeys. Both women were flawed but likeable, and I found O'Neal's writing to be beautiful. This was my first book of hers, but definitely won't be the last!

Thank you Lake Union Publishing and Barbara O’Neal for the copy of The Last Letter of Rachel Ellsworth.

I started out really liking this one, and then when it got to psychics and ghosts, I just couldn’t find my way anymore.

This was a hard book for me to get into because I felt it was often slow. After the divorce, Veronica is having trouble getting her life going. She has 3 children, all of which are the absolute worst. They don’t want her working, but think she should magically be able to drop her job once she gets one. She asks her daughter for some help, who can’t be bothered because she is full of excuses. I just wanted to reach into the book and strangle all of them, which shows how well they were written. But Veronica needs to find a backbone. Your children are all grown up, living outside the home, so you don’t have to have anything to do with your ex, period.

I liked Mariah and felt closer to her. She was struggling a lot. With PTSD and painful healing, she’s had a hard road. I liked how the story came from both female’s perspectives, although I felt breaking the book up into different sections wasn’t needed.

Overall, this is a leisurely told, enjoyable read which kept me perpetually hungry.

Right... I definitely didn't expect this to happen when I decided to read The Last Letter Of Rachel Ellsworth. I've been meaning to try this author for a while now as I kept hearing great things about her books, and I do always love a bout of bookish travel as well as an unlikely friendship trope... So it's easy to understand why this book ended up on my shelves. I fully expected to enjoy my time with this story, but somehow I ended up struggling considerably to even make it to the final page instead. Outlier review ahead!

Before I continue, I do have to say that my reading mood has been particularly fickle lately and I've been struggling with a beginning reading slump, and this might have impacted negatively on my reading experience with The Last Letter Of Rachel Ellsworth. That said, there is no denying that I had a really hard time to find the motivation to keep reading this story... I confess that I started skimreading long before the halfway mark, and I should probably just have DNFed it instead. I'll try to explain below what did and didn't work for me below.

I can't deny that I still love the premise of The Last Letter Of Rachel Ellsworth, and especially its promise of the bookish travel and the mystery around Rachel's unfinished book. I loved the idea of the two women traveling together, and I was especially looking forward to the Morocco and India setting. Sadly, I found the execution to be underwhelming, and there wasn't quite as much focus on the travel itself as I thought there was going to be. Don't get me wrong, the story does take you to the countries mentioned, but somehow the different settings didn't really come alive for me and instead were buried under a huge pile of drama.

And now I have arrived at one of the main issues I had with this book: the drama. I get that the story has to show that both women have a troubled past and explain why the two ended up being unlikely travel companions. It didn't exactly make for an enjoyable beginning, but it's something I could overlook if the rest of the story has a change in focus. And here is where it went wrong for me: the drama doesn't go away, but instead it is possibly even more present and only gets worse over time. It overshadowed every single aspect of the plot I was looking forward to, and as a result it became harder and harder to find the motivation to keep reading.

Directly related to this are the two main characters of this book: to say that I strongly disliked them is an understatement. Sure, I get that Mariah suffered a lot with her mother dying under such horrifying circumstances and herself being seriously injured, but she basically behaves like a petulant and irresponsible teenager most of the time. It is very hard to look past this, and I wasn't a fan of how she treated everyone either. As for Veronica... I found her to be even more frustrating and off-putting. She is basically a human doormat and lets both her ex-husband and her children walk all over her. She is constantly obsessed about her weight and what she eats, and her behavior in general only made me like her less and less over time. The cheating element was just the worst, and it only made me dislike the story and characters even more.

The writing itself wasn't all bad and the premise had a lot of potential, but between the extremely unlikeable characters and overdose of ongoing drama I honestly couldn't care less about what happened to any of them. Especially Veronica I started to hate more and more as I learned more about her past and saw how she behaved... And the drama with her ex and children ruined the rest of the plot. It's a shame there wasn't more focus on the actual travel and Rachel's book, because that was the story I was hoping to find and The Last Letter Of Rachel Ellsworth mainly just left me feeling extremely disappointed. I seem to be in the minority so far though, so definitely don't give up on my account if you think this book is your cup of tea.