In this story, the depressed fifty-three-year-old widow Lily Constable, after her husband Cam’s recent death, returns to her family’s cottage in Edgewater, Maine, to take Cam’s ashes to their resting place, although it is the offseason in Maine, and it is believed that the summer people cannot take a Maine winter by the sea.

The cottage is the place where Lily used to spend her summers as a kid since the family lived in Washington D.C. because her father was a professor and her mother an artist. While in the cottage, Lily recalls a certain summer in 1962, when she fell for a boy named Jon Lowell and another little girl, the nasty Peaches, who was being raised by her grandparents, was jealous of Lily and caused bad things to happen, which ended Jon’s life.

This haunted cottage also lets Lily remember her mother’s illness and her passing and her and her brother's having to live with their father. When her brother rebels and leaves home, it had become Lily's job to stay with her father.

While Lily is grieving for her husband in this cottage, she uncovers hidden things about her parents and her husband, and even Peaches in dramatic happenings, which makes the ending of a quietly beautiful novel suddenly complex. As much as I liked this author’s writing, I felt that this ending clashed with the beginning tone in this story.

Still, the setting and the descriptions of the natural world in Edgewater, the intricacy of the main characters, and the author’s splendid storytelling make this a very good novel.

entertainment, especially if the reader is partial to women's fiction.

The part with Lily and Jon in 1962.

how complicated the plot got at the end, although it made good, exciting reading.

is Anne Rivers Siddons, an American novelist, born in the south in 1936 but embracing everything American. Her books are: Heartbreak Hotel, The House Next Door, Fox's Earth, Homeplace, Peachtree Road, King's Oak, Outer Banks, Colony, Hill Towns, Downtown, Fault Lines,Up Island, Low Country, Nora Nora, Islands, Sweetwater Creek, Off Season, Burnt Mountain, The Girls of August

I had fun reading it and the author's writing pulled me in, except for the complicated ending, which some readers may find exciting.

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Created Oct 12, 2018 at 5:18pm • Submit your own review...