The Silver Boat
A Novel
-
-
4.6 • 7 Ratings
-
-
- $14.99
Publisher Description
Bestseller Luanne Rice returns with a novel as timeless as the sea on which it's set.
From the beloved New York Times bestselling Luanne Rice comes a heartwarming yet heart-wrenching portrait of three far-flung sisters who come home to Martha's Vineyard one last time. Their mother's beach house is the only place any of them ever found true happiness and they need to begin the difficult process of letting go. Memories of their grandmother, mother, and their Irish father, who sailed away the year Dar turned twelve, rise up and expose the fine cracks in their family myth-especially when a cache of old letters reveals enough truth to send them back to their ancestral homeland.
Transplanted into the unfamiliar, each sister sees life, her heart, and her relationship to home in a new way. But how do they let go of a place that contains the complicated love of their imperfect family? Without the house, where will they be together?
The novel is a season on Martha's Vineyard; a mission to Ireland; a cast of friends, including one wildly off-the-grid Zen genius; passionate love in the surf; and three very different sisters with lives filled with beauty, sorrow, and deep love they'd never been quite sure they could trust. The Silver Boat is Luanne Rice at her very best, complete with her singular talent for capturing a family in all its flawed complexity.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In her sweet but unsurprising latest, perennial bestseller Rice (Deep Blue Sea for Beginners) links the fate of three sisters to that of their parents' summer home on Martha's Vineyard, where the sisters gather to clean out the house for its sale. Dar, Delia, and Rory McCarthy are the daughters of an heiress and a carpenter, a troublesome romance that ended when the eldest, Dar, was 12 and their father disappeared at sea. Now, decades later, Dar lives alone at the edge of the family property, channeling her grief into writing and her love into an affair. Delia and Rory are stuck in rocky marriages, and Delia's son, Pete, simply founders. After Dar finds some telling correspondence in the house, the sisters travel to Ireland to finally resolve the mystery of their father's disappearance. The answer helps them deal with the past, with current relationships, and with chances for future happiness (and gives them some leverage in selling the house). Rice enriches familiar themes of family, failure, redemption, and romance with a watercolor-lovely portrait of Martha's Vineyard and sketches of the tug-of-war between sea and sand, rich and poor, development and preservation characteristic of the island.
