Book Review for When You Loved Me by Beatriz Williams

 

When You Loved Me by Beatriz Williams

Pulished:  June 23, 2026 by Ballantine Books

Genre:  Historical Fiction, Romance, Summer Reads

Taken from Goodreads:  A young widow returns to her late father’s New England estate, only to be drawn into the hunt for the rumored pirate treasure that consumed his life, in this thrilling and moving novel from the New York Times bestselling author of Husbands & Lovers.

Local history insists that a legendary pirate buried his treasure somewhere beneath Windward, the decayed Cooper estate on Winthrop Island, but Lucy Cooper never trusted the fable that broke her family apart. When a widowed Lucy returns with her young daughter to grieve her estranged father, she discovers the property’s buried under a mountain of debt, and Ben Ressler has just turned up on her doorstep.

Thirteen summers ago, a teenaged Lucy never meant to fall in love with Ben, a Dartmouth football star vacationing next door at the Peabody estate, and the object of an all-consuming crush by Laura Peabody, Lucy’s best friend. Those two weeks with Ben were the best and worst of Lucy’s life, dooming her friendship with Laura. Now Ben’s returned to live quietly in the Peabodys’ caretaker lodge, after a fatal accident ended his dazzling NFL career. He’s also the last person who saw Lucy’s father alive.

As Lucy reconstructs her father’s troubling final days, she uncovers his research on the frozen winter of 1717, when a desperately wounded pirate sought refuge on Winthrop Island with an enigmatic healer. To Lucy, this history points the way to a different kind of how to forgive yourself for the mistakes of the past and earn a second chance at love. But just as Lucy’s long-buried emotions sear to the surface, a shocking turn of events reveals that someone else on the island will do whatever it takes to claim the fabled plunder.

A timeless story of love and atonement, When You Loved Me maps both a centuries-old treasure hunt and the intimate territory of the human heart, weaving together past and present as only Beatriz Williams can.

 

My Thoughts:  When I pick up a Beatriz Williams book I expect an amazing historical fiction book with multiple timelines.   This is exactly what When You Loved Me is.   The book is fun with the pirates being the historical aspect.  I do not read many pirate books but this one is wonderful.  The current timeline had my heart going in so many ways.  I was broken-hearted that Lucy lost her dad and did not have a great relationship with him.   My heart was soaring as she rediscovered Ben and the feelings that were still there.  The favorite part of Lucy is her as a mother, she is the best. 

The side stories of Laura and of Lucy’s mom did not always seem to be making a difference to the main stories.  I did not hate them, they did add some dimension to Lucy and to Ben but sometimes it seemed like they were just filling pages.

I will always read Beatriz Williams.   Her books bring to life historical stories that are not well known or at least not known to me. 

Thank you Ballantine Books for a copy of the book via NetGalley in exchange for my honest review.

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Meet the Author (taken from her website):  Beatriz Williams is the New York Times, USA Today, and internationally bestselling author of Husbands and Lovers,  The Summer Wives, The Secret Life of Violet Grant, A Hundred Summers, the Wicked City series, and several other works of historical fiction, including five novels in collaboration with fellow bestselling authors Karen White and Lauren Willig. A graduate of Stanford University with an MBA in Finance from Columbia University, Beatriz worked as a communications and corporate strategy consultant in New York and London before her first novel was published in 2012. Beatriz’s books have won numerous awards, have been translated into more than a dozen languages, and appear regularly in bestseller lists around the world. Her essays have appeared in magazines such as Real Simple and Southern Living, among others, and she regularly reviews fiction for the New York Times Book Review.

Born in Seattle, Washington, Beatriz now lives in southeastern Connecticut with her husband and four mostly-grown children.