The Outer Banks House
A Novel
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3.3 • 4 Ratings
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
As the wounds of the Civil War are just beginning to heal, one fateful summer would forever alter the course of a young girl’s life.
In 1868, on the barren shores of post-war Outer Banks North Carolina, the once wealthy Sinclair family moves for the summer to one of the first cottages on the ocean side of the resort village of Nags Head. Seventeen-year-old Abigail is beautiful, book-smart, but sheltered by her plantation life and hemmed-in by her emotionally distant family. To make good use of time, she is encouraged by her family to teach her father’s fishing guide, the good-natured but penniless Benjamin Whimble, how to read and write. And in a twist of fate unforeseen by anyone around them, there on the porch of the cottage, the two come to love each other deeply, and to understand each other in a way that no one else does.
But when, against everything he claims to represent, Ben becomes entangled in Abby's father's Ku Klux Klan work, the terrible tragedy and surprising revelations that one hot Outer Banks night brings forth threaten to tear them apart forever.
With vivid historical detail and stunning emotional resonance, Diann Ducharme recounts a dramatic story of love, loss, and coming of age at a singular and rapidly changing time in one of America’s most beautiful and storied communities.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In Ducharme s strong debut, 17-year-old Abigail Sinclair arrives at the Outer Banks with her family, whose fortunes are on the wane after the defeat of the South in the Civil War. Abigail is being courted by a doctor s son, the foppish Hector Newman, and though she knows a marriage to him will please her family, she finds is drawn to a local fisherman, Benjamin Whimble, whom she is teaching to read and write. As her attraction to Whimble grows, she realizes what s important to her and what she is willing to fight for when revelations about her father complicate her relationships. Characters are not terribly complex Ben is a quintessential earthy blue-collar hero, and Hector an overprivileged dandy with a controlling streak but Abigail is a good heroine. Ducharme s extensive use of dialect will enrich the experience of some readers and irritate others, but despite its flaws, this novel brings to life the difficult and uncertain world of Reconstruction North Carolina with a romantic but unsympathetic eye.
