"Soon or a little too lateeverything you never knewyou always wanted turns uphereat The Breakers" -- from the book In her new novel At The Breakers, Mary Ann Taylor-Hall, author of the widely praised and beloved Come and Go, Molly Snow, presents Jo Sinclair, a longtime single mother of four children. Fleeing an abusive relationship after a shocking attack, Jo finds herself in Sea Cove, New Jersey, in front of The Breakers, a salty old hotel in the process of renovation. Impulsively, she negotiates a job painting the guest rooms and settles in with her youngest child, thirteen-year-old Nick. As each room is transformed under brush and roller, Jo finds a way to renovate herself, reclaiming a promising life derailed by pregnancy and a forced marriage at age fourteen. Jo's new life at the hotel features a memorable mix of locals and guests, among them Iris Zephyr, the hotel's ninety-two-year-old permanent boarder; Charlie, a noble mixed-breed dog; Marco, owner of a nearby gas station/liquor store, who may become Jo's next mistake; and enigmatic Wendy, her streetwise eighteen-year-old daughter, who signs on as housekeeper. Irrepressible Victor Mangold, Jo's former professor and a well-known poet some twenty years her senior, invites himself to Thanksgiving dinner and into her life, his passion awakening Jo's yearning for art and love. At The Breakers is a deeply felt and beautifully written novel about forgiveness and reconciliation. In Jo's words, she is "trying to find the right way to live" as a long-suffering woman who is put through the fire and emerges with a chance at a full, rich life for herself and her children, if only she has the faith to take it.
| ||||||||||||||||||
Book Description
Frequently Bought Together
Editorial Reviews
Review
""At The Breakers is beautifully written, a deep exploration of the complex demands and joys and risks of all kinds of love."--Kim Edwards, author of The Memory Keeper's Daughter" --
""A mother's blood guilt runs the heart of this powerful novel. When it is at last resolved, a pale flower of happiness blooms, the best any of us can expect late in a rich, complicated life."--Sallie Bingham, author of Red Car: Stories" --
""There are many good reasons to read At the Breakers: the perfectly drawn setting (having grown up on the South Jersey Shore, I recognized it immediately), the careful handling of complex relationships between an imperfect mother and her grown daughters, and the vivid cast that populates the hotel; but what delights me most is the character of Victor Mangold, a kind poet with great joie de vivre, with whom I couldn't help falling in love." -- Ellen Bass, author of The Human Line and Mules of Love" --
""Mary Ann Taylor-Hall is a deeply gifted writer whose stories will change your life--don't miss anything she writes. Her carefully crafted characters in At The Breakers will extend and enrich your sense of family and connection/disconnection forever." --Naomi Shihab Nye, author of Going Going" --
""There's wisdom in Taylor-Hall's insistence that plunging into the depths of trust and love...is as essential as it is risky. At the Breakers is as eloquent as it is joyous and intelligent." --L. Elisabeth Beattie, Louisville Courier-Journal" --
""The author of Come and GO, Molly Snow returns with a courageous, well-rendered novel about forgiveness and reconciliation. Its heroine, put through the fire, comes out with a chance for happiness -- if she can muster the faith, courage, and optimism to take that chance." --Joseph-Beth Booksellers Newsletter" --
""Taylor-Hall's voice rings true and the characters are fully developed and intriguing. I didn't want to end my visit to the world Taylor-Hall created. For me that's a successful novel. A perfect read for the summer." --Elizabeth Bright, Armchair Interviews" --
""This is a tale of reconciliation, forgiveness, hope and love written by one of Kentucky's most intriguing writers." --Larry Cox, Tucson Citizen" --
""Taylor-Hall creates a cast of characters... who are undeniably wonderful, casting a party that the reader does not want to miss, despite the pain and loneliness that accompany them. And the reason is that along with that pain comes companionship, kindness, empathy and the opportunity for love in its varying forms.... [Taylor-Hall's] prose is as rhythmic and entrancing as the movements of the waves." --Linda Hinchcliffe,Chevy Chaser" --
""At the Breakers presents a complex, often mystifying look at someone hoping to overcome past mistakes. Author Taylor-Hall... skillfully rides the contour of human emotions to provide a story of a character we really want to succeed." --Steve Flairty, Kentucky Monthly" --
About the Author
Mary Ann Taylor-Hall is a recipient of the Barnes & Noble "Discover Great New Writers" award. and the author of How She Knows What She Knows About Yo-yos (Sarabande), which received Foreword Magazine's Book of the Year Award, and Come and Go, Molly Snow (Norton). She is the recipient of a PEN/Syndicated Fiction Award and has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Kentucky Arts Council.
Product Details
Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
|
More About the Author
Customer Reviews
|
Share your thoughts with other customers:
|
||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Didn't love it, but .........,
By
This review is from: At The Breakers: A Novel (Kentucky Voices) (Hardcover)
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Program (What's this?)
I did enjoy a lot of it. This book was definitely worth the time to read and I found myself picking it up again very easily each time. It's not complex but I don't think it falls into the chick-lit category either. Glad I read it but I don't feel a great need to recommend it to friends.
The main character is a forty-two year old woman who has 4 children, giving birth to the first child when she was 15 years old. That event is the defining moment in the book that sets everything else into motion. Married young to the father and giving birth to a second child, the marriage predictably falls apart and she moves on to other marriages and other children continually making bad choices and struggling with the enormous task of raising four children on her own with minimal family support and trying to finish her own education. Part of me felt very sympathetic with the character and part of me kept thinking that she was making one bad decision after the next and largely causing her own continuing problems. While an interesting and quick read, there are some very real problems with the book that keep it from being as good as it could have been. 1) the cast of characters is just too large -- even major characters seemed to be left too two-dimensional 2) there were some very unrealistic situations -- how many parents are going to really send their 14-year-old, pregnant daughter across the country with her equally young husband to live and have a baby with no financial support? They couldn't legally even sign the contract on their apartment, couldn't drive, would even have difficulty getting jobs due to child labor laws but none of this ever is addressed. 3) some events that appear to have deep meaning are never explained. There is an entire sequence where one of the daughters shows up unexpectedly for Christmas and a whole collection of Christmas gifts are retreived from Jo's (the main character) room for her including a painting. The painting mysteriously appears, is described as so significant in her life (even though we have never heard of it before), is given to the daughter who immediately grasps the emotional support being bestowed upon her throught the giving of the gift. After that the painting disappears never to be referenced again. This happens multiple times where things just show up and then the story-line is dropped. The bottom line on this is that it's good, but not great. As the author continues to develop (and the quality of the editing improves) this author has a lot of potential to write really outstanding books -- this one just isn't quite there yet.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
If you like Lifetime movies, you'll probably like this book,
By
This review is from: At The Breakers: A Novel (Kentucky Voices) (Hardcover)
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Program (What's this?)
At the Breakers by Mary Ann Taylor-Hall appealed to me because the protagonist is a single mother, leaving a difficult relationship, seeking refuge in her new job at renovating a hotel, while finally giving herself to explore her dreams of being a writer. For all intents and purposes, I should have loved Jo Sinclair and I kept hoping I would. When in the first chapter she doesn't call the police as she should . . . nor in the second .. . or third, I was prepared to throw the book across the room.
Perhaps I should have but the truth this is not a badly written book. If you like Lifetime movies or preferred the movie version of Under the Tuscan Sun to the memoir then you'll probably like this book. Woman leaves a bad situation and tries to salvage her life and the lives of her children while also trying to find herself. Of course there is a romantic interest and another possible one to complicate the inevitable one. It is all so predictable that I knew how it would end by the end of the third chapter. The writing is adequate but there are flaws that keep this from being a well written book. Too predictable and peopled with characters who stay on the page rather than leaping from them and into the reader's heart, this is a quickly read and forgotten novel. But if you don't like or feel a great deal of sympathy for Jo Sinclair by the end of the first few chapters you won't feel any by the end of the book. I know I didn't. SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS I was frustrated, while reading the novel, that obvious errors were not caught. Disneyworld is in Florida, not California. And when I read that Jo gave Victor a pocket watch I was utterly baffled. Not once had this pocket watch been mentioned prior to its magical appearance and yet she managed to not only get his pocket watch from his possession to have it repaired but she did so while living in a different state! Not once does Taylor-Hall hint at this gift prior to its manifestation, let share with the reader that Jo has a gift for Victor in mind. She just seems to drop the watch onto the page and presume that the reader will take the whole back story on faith, I suppose. I'm still trying to figure out how she managed to get the watch from him without his noticing. Another example of almost the same thing occurs when Erica, her middle daughter, arrives for Christmas with no warning. Jo, not expecting Erica's visit, has no gifts for the girl. She sees a painting on the wall and the reader gets to hear all about how Jo found and bought the painting, etc. Naturally she wraps this painting up and gives it to Erica. A better way to present the painting to the reader would have been to have Jo hang it up as soon as her room was painted and ready for her to move into, have the back story shared in that earlier chapter. Then, when Jo makes the decision to give the painting to her daughter, the reader would have a better appreciation of it's intimacy and importance. As it is, the painting is thrown on the wall just in time for Jo to give it to her daughter. It's rather like Chekhov's mandate that if there's a knife on the wall in the first act it had better be used by the third--only in reverse where a knife appears by the third act where no knife was before. These details, along with the predictability and poorly realized characters kept this novel from being anything more than adequate. It's a shame. I think the author has the ability to write better but I don't think I have the patience to read anything else she's read to ascertain if my intuition is correct or not.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Okay, but leaves me with a "So what?" feeling,
By JujubeMBA (USA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: At The Breakers: A Novel (Kentucky Voices) (Hardcover)
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Program (What's this?)
This book tries to be literary and tries to explore the difficulties inherent in the mother-daughter relationship. The needs of each conflicting, and both sides of the story.
The main character is just a sad sack without a lot to recommend her. She's made a lifetime of bad choices, lived a sad life and passed the same on to her kids in various, uninteresting ways. Overall the story is sad and dull, and lacking in character vibrancy or sympathy. In the end I was left with a "so what?" feeling. I suppose the mother's final decision is supposed to be somehow redeeming or at least hopeful but for me the story lacked any real conflict or resolution. It was just an ongoing drone of sadness.
Share your thoughts with other customers: Create your own review
|
|
New York, Sea Cove, Marco Meese, New Brunswick, Hank Dunegan, Victor Mangold, New Jersey, The Breakers, Washington Square, Iris Zephyr, Atlantic Boulevard, West End Avenue, Monsieur Fabian, Merry Christmas, Tony Giordano, Jane Austen, Tinton Falls, Upper West Side, Atlantic City, Saint Bonnie, New Year's Eve, Uncle Claude, San Francisco, Where's Nick, Veronica Caspari Browse Sample Pages:
Front Cover | Table of Contents | First Pages | Back Cover | Surprise Me!
Tags Customers Associate with This Product(What's this?)Click on a tag to find related items, discussions, and people.
|
Customer Discussions
|
This product's forum
Active discussions in related forums
Search Customer Discussions
|
Related forums
|
