From Publishers Weekly
Is there an impulse stronger than lust—real estate lust, that is—for the comfortably middle-aged? Maybe not, teases Bernays (
Professor Romeo, etc.) in this astute, witty romance, beguilingly set in the Cape Cod towns of Truro and Provincetown. Dannie Faber, a successful illustrator of children's books, is so attached to her beach house that she lives there April to November—even though she's frequently separated from husband Tom, a "gentle and distracted" MIT professor. It's a year after 9/11, and Dannie's Truro house has become a haven in a world where "civilization had cracked, setting people and events off in wild spinning." But then crass hotelier Mitch Brenner constructs a "monster house" distressingly nearby—and somebody writes "Jew Pig" in red paint (or is it blood?) on his front door. As Dannie and best friend Raymie speculate about the wrongdoer, readers may expect the plot to focus on the crime. But Bernays switches gears: Dannie turns inward as her marriage falls apart and she begins an affair with her New York editor; floundering daughter Beth moves back home; and Brenner makes a surprising alliance with Raymie. Though the plot is a bit untidy, readers will bond with Bernays's prickly, opinionated, bighearted heroine.
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Literary veteran Bernays' compulsively readable novel features a spectacular setting: Truro, Cape Cod. And she entwines two hot topics in the opening chapters: hate crime and the construction of hideous McMansions. But basically this is a sprightly, feminist there-is-life-after-divorce tale. Dannie is a successful children's book illustrator who, now that her daughter and son are adults, loves best to be alone at the family's Truro home with her dog and her art, while her MIT anthropology professor husband lives in Boston. But everything is thrown into turmoil when an outsider builds a monstrous beach house on which someone scrawls an anti-Semitic threat. Suddenly, Dannie is forced to recognize that her marriage has gone cold, just as her daughter realizes that she, too, is in a moribund relationship. Bernays quickly drops any pretense of insights into conspicuous consumption and prejudice, and goes full throttle for a stereotypical women's fiction story line, which she executes with panache, a genuine feel for natural beauty and class conflicts, and an understanding of how smothering marriage can be.
Donna SeamanCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
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