Review by Booklist Review
Seasoned novelist Fowler (A Good Neighborhood, 2020) offers up a tightly coiled family saga. After the Geller sisters' mother passes away, they are left with the family vacation home as their inheritance. Claire, Sophie, and Beck make their way to Mount Desert Island, Maine, to sever their connection to "the camp," and take their share of the proceeds. The home, a 1960s bungalow overlooking the water, becomes the center of the story as the sisters tie up loose ends and sell the property. Fowler writes in chapters that alternate characters' viewpoints, releasing with each one, in a slow drip, the long-held secrets the sisters have been keeping from each other. When charming southerner C.J. enters the picture--bringing his own buried past and a connection to the Geller family--he desperately wants to buy their family home to create a fresh start of his own. Fowler expertly peels back the layers of each character in this page-turner, making for a highly entertaining summer read.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Fowler (The Good Neighborhood) returns with a smooth Austenesque tale of midlife reckoning. Matriarch Marti Geller, faced with terminal cancer, worries about her daughters. "That is what wills are for," Fowler writes, "to pull the strings you weren't able to... in life." The oldest, Beck, a freelance writer, is stuck in a sexless marriage. Claire, a cardiologist, is recently divorced and pining for a man she shouldn't be. Sophie, an art curator, is Instagram famous, but drowning in debt. Upon Marti's death, the girls are left with instructions to gather one last time at the family summer home off the coast of Maine before selling it and splitting the proceeds. In chapters from alternating points of view, Fowler skillfully captures each woman's contemporary narrative and backstory without losing the thread of time and place even as the book hopscotches through flashbacks and locales ranging from Mount Desert Island to Duluth and Dubai. At times she relies on too convenient coincidences to move the plot and the random insertions of an omniscient narrator to explain things, but the well-developed character studies keep the reader chugging along until the satisfying conclusion. Neither too complex nor too light, this goes down as easily as an Aperol spritz. (June)
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
Love, lies, and long-buried secrets surface as a favored family summer home in Maine is put up for sale. The title is something of a giveaway in Fowler's latest, a story of problems endured over many years, sometimes at significant personal cost, but, once aired and shared, reaching self-evident solutions. Sisters Beck, Claire, and Sophie Geller, with their contrasting careers and lifestyles, must come together after the loss of their mother, Marti, whose will requires them to sell the beloved summer cottage they have inherited, a remote house on Mount Desert Island. Sophie, who works in Manhattan's art world but whose life has suddenly upended, needs the money the sale would bring. Claire, a doctor whose marriage has failed, could use the cash, too, but welcomes the distraction from unrequited love that the house brings. Beck, a journalist married to book editor Paul, wants to keep the house as a place in which to write the novel she's longed to complete. Doing so would also liberate her from her kind but sexless marriage. Paul, meanwhile, has a secret--he yearns for Claire, and Claire (unbeknownst to Paul) yearns back. Marti kept secrets, too, and Beck has lied to Paul, both for financial and sexual reasons. She's recently spent an amazing night with C.J. Reynolds, a figure from her past who has his own problematic backstory. Backstories indeed fill many pages in this exposition-heavy, distinctly soapy story, which devotes most of its attention to elaborating the problems set up to be unraveled. Fowler presents the family members in great detail; less so in the case of the perfunctory C.J., though he too will reach a happy resolution. So, this is what it all comes down to--a tying up of much-dangled loose ends. Romantic and other dilemmas reach flagged-up conclusions in a novel whose destination is gratification. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
