Dana Underhill, a painter who has been betrayed by her lover in France, returns home to Connecticut after her sister Lily’s and brother-in-law’s deaths to take care of her two nieces, the troubled Quinn and the younger Allie. There she runs into a Yale professor Sam Trevor, a man much younger than Dana, to whom she had taught sailing when he was eight years old. Sam has loved Dana ever since and promises to help her with the mystery surrounding her sister’s death. The novel’s focus is on the relationship of two sisters of two consecutive generations salted with sprinkles of romance, a troubled child, accidents at sea, and grief. At the end, the mystery is solved and it comes to nothing, making the plot a much ado about nothing.

The setting: beach, ocean, sailing, New England shores. This setting urged me read the book throughout.

the author promising some deep dark mystery at the beginning of the book and then not following through. What came up at the end of the story was a conjured-up wishy washy sentimentality. Also most of the events had no focus. The children taking the boat out in a gale to pay off their parents’ debt didn’t make sense at all, either.

sorry to have read it throughout.

Luanne Rice is a romance writer who has a respectable voice though overly sentimental. Her other books, Cloud Nine, Summer Light, Follow the Stars Home, True Blue, and Firefly Beach, are well-liked by the readers of romance novels.

you’ll probably like it, if you’re a dedicated romance novel reader. There is a subtle romance in it and it has one good description of an intimate scene, although it is unrelated to the central theme. The writing is clean with morally decent characters who never do anything truly objectionable even when they think they do.

It doesn’t live up to Jane Eyre’s or Doctor Zhivago’s caliber of a romance story. Maybe as an off-the-rack romance novel, it is all right, but I’m not qualified to judge that since I do little reading in this genre.

I had difficulty with this book for I felt the plot was weak and the characters, at least most of them, were underdeveloped. But the worst was the hope given to the reader in the beginning of the book that some deep dark secret would be revealed and practically nothing was found at the end. As a reader, I cannot stand red herrings especially the whopper-sized ones.

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Created Nov 18, 2003 at 3:16pm • Submit your own review...