Name: Maine
ISBN: 9780307742216

J. Courtney Sullivan

As three generations of Kelleher women descend on their family's Maine beach property one summer, each brings her own hopes and fears. By turns wickedly funny and achingly sad, this novel unveils sibling rivalry, alcoholism, social climbing, and Catholic guilt at the center of one family.

Maine

Three generations of women converge on the family beach house in this wickedly funny, emotionally resonant story of love and dysfunction.

A Novel

Melissa Palmer

#54 Book Read in 2012
Maine by J. Courtney Sullivan

A beach cottage in Maine is the setting for a family full of issues. Alice is the matriarch who lives at the beach cottage. Every summer her children and grandchildren come out for a month (rotating the time through each child and family) to spend time at the beach house. Alice is a hard woman for them to feel connected to and she is not really enamored with how her children and grandchildren turned out. The fur really begins to fly when the children find out that Alice has agreed to donate the cottage and land to her church after her death. Alice's children are devastated; they assumed they would inherit the place and that their children could continue to spend time there in the summer.

But this book is more about a beach house. This book details the complicated relationships among family members. Alice's daughter Kathleen is a recovering alcoholic. She has not come to the beach house for years. She does this summer after learning that her own daughter, Maggie, is pregnant and no longer with the father of the baby. Ann Marie, Alice's daughter-in-law, is not happy in her marriage. She feels taken for granted by her husband and by Alice, as Ann Marie is the one who does the bulk of the domestic matters.

The characters in this book are complicated and sometimes hard to like but they are interesting to read about and to follow. The description of the setting is well written. I enjoyed this book.

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Chelsea White

Maine was not what I first expected it would be when I first heard about the book, but I liked it all the same. Three generations of Kelleher women collide in their family's beach-side home in Maine, and all their tensions and secrets manifest during the two weeks they spend together. While it was hard to like any of the characters, with the exception of Maggie, at the end of the book I felt a tenderness for them, as if they were my own family. Overall a good book, definitely not a feel-good summer book, if that's what you're looking for (and what some people have assumed it is given the cover photo).

Maine

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