Review: Liberty Island by Virginia Hume

Liberty Island by Virginia Hume

Blurb from Goodreads:

1900: 28-year-old Anna Bradley spends summer days supervising three little girls, including her niece, Julia Demarest, on an island off the coast of Haven Point, Maine. There, the girls run free, pretending to be all the things society says they pirates and rum runners, treasure hunters and Roughriders.

A college graduate determined to remain unmarried, Anna is eager to establish herself independently. Inspired by the summer antics of Julia and her friends, Anna writes "Liberty Island"—a depiction of girls unshackled from the domestic sphere—under a pen name. Young readers are rhapsodic, and it is a runaway bestseller, but it’s not well received by the society matrons in her sister’s circle, who believe that books for girls should prepare them for their future as wives and mothers.

With "Liberty Island" growing in popularity, Anna’s secret is in peril, and when she’s suddenly thrown together with the former object of her affections, she must rethink everything she thought she knew about independence, marriage, and her dreams for her future.

1922: 29-year-old Julia Demarest was once proud of her aunt’s "Liberty Island" books. But as new, bohemian ideas take hold amongst her peers, she has come to see them as quaint, at best. In hindsight, her childhood summers on the island seem like more of an exile than a liberation, and her Boston Brahmin family—particularly her mother, Elizabeth Demarest—like relics of an unlamented past.

But in an effort to break free of expectations, she has ended up alienated from her family and heartbroken when a romantic entanglement with a free-spirited intellectual ends badly. When Elizabeth urgently calls her back to Haven Point, Julia is confronted by all the things she's been trying to escape, and forced to reconsider what truly brings her happiness.

A sweeping saga set in the first tumultuous decades of the twentieth century, Liberty Island is an ode to mothers and daughters, love, friendship, and the ways in which women define freedom on their own terms.

My Review:

This started a bit slow but then turned into the perfect family saga that I was expecting and wanting.  It was unique in how it was told but also so well written!  The characters leaped off the page and my heart was pulled in a million different directions.  Perfect ending - you will not be disappointed by this one!!

Liberty Island comes out next week on May 5, 2026, and you can purchase HERE!  

Late in the afternoon, the girls were on the beach—a bit grubby and tired, but the good kind that comes after a long, merry day. 

At first, they had been so terrified that Aunt Phillipa would discover that they didn't have a chaperone after all, they thought every passing boat was coming to fetch them. 

To ward off the possibility, they tried holding their breath until the boats went by, like one does when passing a cemetery, but it turned out that a carriage passes a cemetery a good deal faster than boats passed islands, so they had to give that up. Audrey came up with an incantation to use instead: "Please make that boat go another way, for on this island we wish to stay." It worked like a charm. (Well, it was a charm. So it worked like it was supposed to.)