From Publishers Weekly
No one does coastal melodrama like veteran Siddons (
Homeplace). Lilly Constable McCall, 53, has led an enviable life—marriage and children with a successful architect, her own success as a sculptor—but husband Cam's death sends her spiraling. She returns to the coastal family cottage in Edgewater, Maine, where she spent her childhood, and where Cam died. There, she recalls the summer of 1962, and the arrival in town of new girl Peaches Davenport, who envies all Lilly has. That includes the attentions of attractive older boy Jon Lowell, who awakens grown-up feelings in Lilly's 11-year-old heart. But it's Lilly's place as the daughter of a Washington, D.C., professor and the sporadically successful painter and activist Elizabeth Constable—that makes Lilly's childhood most attractive to Peaches, and to readers. Jon may have shared her first kiss, and Cam her home and children, but it's the changing relationship between Lilly and the elusive, enigmatic Elizabeth that makes this story fresh.
(Aug.) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Her family’s cottage on the coast of Maine is haunted, and that suits Lilly Constable just fine. Returning to Edgewater after the death of her beloved husband, Cam, Lilly takes comfort in carrying on detailed conversations with the spirit that she feels pervades the site of so much joy, and yet so much tragedy, in her life. Revisiting the happy times of her marriage and their unconventional courtship also propels Lilly further down memory lane, however, forcing her to recall the years spent living in isolation with her widowed father after her mother’s death from breast cancer, and the summer she turned 11 and her first love, Jon, died in a tragic boating accident. As Lilly works through her grief for her husband, mother, and old friend, she uncovers startling revelations about the very people she thought she knew best. With a powerhouse ending dazzling in its stealth and ambiguity, master storyteller Siddons delivers a dramatically evocative tale that magically summons a bygone time of innocence and intrigue. --Carol Haggas
![[Start the discussion]](http://g-ecx.images-amazon.com/images/G/01/x-locale/communities/discussion_boards/start-new-discussion-sec._V192250339_.gif){kind=small}
