Chesapeake Blue (Chesapeake Blue - Nora Roberts)

Member Name: Brooke3

Product:	Chesapeake Blue - Nora Roberts
Date:	01/11/08 (34 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: well written, romantic

Disadvantages: this is the fourth book so it's probably best not to read this one first

Chesapeake Blue is the fourth and last book in Nora Roberts Chesapeake Bay series (also known as the Qhuinn Brothers).

The series is about four adopted brothers. The oldest three were adopted by Stella and Ray Qhuinn, all of them coming from troubled backgrounds. Long after Stella has died and the older Qhuinn brothers have moved out Ray adopts Seth. Shortly after Ray dies leaving behind Seth and a lot of questions regarding his paternity.
The older Qhuinn brothers return home to raise Seth and protect him from his abusive mother.
The first three books contain their stories.
Chesapeake Blue is set about twenty years after the first three books. Seth is a successful artist who has returned to Chesapeake Bay to his family. He meets Drusilla Whitcomb-Banks who is new in town. I'm not going to give away the ending!

This book reads well as a stand alone novel but even better if you've read the first three books.
I loved the entire series but I think this was my favourite out of them all. It was romantic, heartbreaking in parts and like all of Nora Roberts books well written. I loved seeing Seth as an adult and it was great revisiting the other Qhuinn brothers and seeing how their lives turned out.
I had always liked Seth as a character, he was so complex and interesting but Seth as a child and Seth as an adult are so different, as you would expect. I think the way that Roberts managed to develop his character without writing much about the time between the last book and this one was really good. It doesn't ever feel like she's forced him to change to fit the book, but rather that he developed naturally into the adult that he was, almost like a real person. Seth is still quite complicated and still carries the scars from his past but it's good to see him go from a victim to a survivor.

At times the storyline was a little bit slow which is one of my few complaints about this book. I did also feel that Roberts spent an unnecessary amount of time with the other characters who had already had their books. It was nice to see that they were still happy together after all these years but at times she spent too much time focused on that in my opinion.

Summary: The final installment in the Chesapeake Bay series.