Estep Nagy

Maine island sagas come in many forms – beach reads, generational tales, summer people vs lifers – but this one is a bit different and more intense. Two families – the Hillsingers and the Quicks – share Seven Island and much history and enmity, including intermarriage, suicide, and the McCarthy era. Set in 1964, there’s political intrigue and a riveting coming-of-age tale. The PoVs switch off effectively, and although it’s a bit slow in spots, the rituals of the island and the back stories of the families make this a satisfying picture of aoppressive era and a life before everything sped up and changed.… (más)

I seem to be facing a rut when it comes to books: nothing I've read has turned out the way I expected. I was really looking forward to this story but it ended up leaving me dissatisfied. While the author put a lot of thought into the various descriptions, and the writing style was quite nice, the story itself failed on a lot of levels. One of the major flaws with this book is that there are too many plot lines. Each one begins at random points and they all interweave to create a confusing mess. Everything just began to meld together and make no sense to me; frankly, it was exhausting to get through this novel. the other flaw with this book is that the characters are hard to connect to; there is this distance between the reader and the characters such that it is hard to empathize or understand them. I really like it when authors pull me into the lives of their characters but that didn't happen in this story. As I kept reading, I just had this growing impression that the author was trying to hard to create a meaningful literary fiction. In the end, a simpler story with more complex and well-developed characters would have sufficed.

I received this novel as an advanced copy from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.… (más)