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In her best-selling debut, Commencement, J. Courtney Sullivan explored the complicated and contradictory panorama of female companionship. Now, in her highly predicted second novel, Sullivan can take us into even richer territory, introducing four remarkable women who've nothing in common but the simple fact that, like it or not, they're family. For the Kellehers, Maine is a place where children run in packs, showers are considered outside, and old Irish songs are sung around a piano. Their beachfront property, won on the barroom bet after the war, rests on three acres of sand and pine nestled between exercises of rocky seacoast, with one tree bearing the initials "A.H." On the cottage, built by Kelleher hands, cocktail hour practices day mass, nosy grandchildren snoop in drawers, and decades-old grudges simmer under the surface. As three generations of Kelleher women descend on the house one summertime, each brings her own hopes and anxieties. Maggie is thirty-two and pregnant, looking forward to the perfect second to tell her imperfect partner the news headlines; Ann Marie, a Kelleher by matrimony, is channeling her local disappointment into a dollhouse obsession and an ill-advised crush; Kathleen, the black sheep, never wished to set foot in the cottage again; and Alice, the matriarch at the guts of it all, would operate every floorboard for a chance to undo the situations of one night, long ago. By changes wickedly funny and achingly sad, Maine unveils the sibling rivalry, alcoholism, communal climbing, and Catholic guilt at the guts of one family, combined with the abiding, often irrational love that helps to keep them coming back, every summertime, to Maine and each other.
