Safe Harbor
-
-
4.5 • 40 Ratings
-
-
- $6.99
Publisher Description
New York Times bestselling author Luanne Rice has touched the hearts and lives of readers everywhere with powerful tales of love and loss . . . and love regained. In an unforgettable novel set on her beloved Connecticut seaside, she weaves a timeless story.
After every storm there is a place to return to—if you have the courage to follow your heart. . . .
Artist Dana Underhill has always been a free spirit, traveling the world, filling her canvases with the mysterious colors of the seas she and her sister have sailed since childhood. Then on a calm, moonlit night an inexplicable “accident” occurs and Dana is called home to Hubbard’s Point to become a mother to her two young nieces, a challenge unlike any she’s ever known.
As Dana and the girls struggle to begin a new life—and to find the truth about what happened to Dana’s sister and brother-in-law—help comes in the person of an old childhood friend. Sam Trevor is now a tall, striking marine biologist, and he’s been in love with Dana for years. Although she can’t begin to contemplate opening her heart again, together Dana and Sam will discover that Hubbard’s Point is the center of endless mysteries—and endless possibilities. And as Dana rediscovers her passion as an artist and a woman, she will find more than a lifetime’s share of answers, magic, and love in the only safe harbor there is.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The sacred bond of sisterhood is explored in painstaking detail in Rice's newest offering (after Summer Light), a warm and weepy drama set in the picaresque seaside town of Black Hall, Conn. The novel sets sail slowly when a grief-stricken Dana Underhill returns home to care for her two nieces, Quinn and Allie, following the death of her sister, Lily, and Lily's husband, Mike, in a sailing accident. Dana, a professional painter, had intended to whisk her nieces back to France with her, but her plans are put on hold when she realizes that change may not be what's best for Quinn and Allie. Indeed, Quinn, a cigarette-smoking 12-year-old with a chip on her shoulder, is dead set against leaving, particularly since she's determined to uncover the circumstances surrounding her parents' deaths. The mystery of Mike and Lily's drowning and the state of their marriage before the accident weighs down the second half of the book, but the pace picks up when Dana's childhood acquaintance, oceanographer and Yale professor Sam Trevor, arrives to provide Dana with a shoulder to lean on and to help Quinn find the answers she seeks. While Quinn and Sam make plans to recover her parents' sailboat, Dana struggles to overcome her sister's death and to paint again. The affection between Dana and Sam is heartwarming and convincing, but the novel's finale involving the rescue of Quinn and Allie during a fierce storm with the aid of a little divine intervention is anticlimactic. Less a romance than a somber meditation on the importance of family ties, this saccharine read is buoyed by Rice's evocative prose and her ability to craft intelligent, three-dimensional characters.
