The Cottage at Glass Beach
Married to the youngest attorney general in Massachusetts state history, Nora Cunningham is a picture-perfect political wife and a doting mother. But her carefully constructed life falls to pieces when she, along with the rest of the world, learns of the infidelity of her husband, Malcolm.
Humiliated and hounded by the press, Nora packs up her daughters—Annie, seven; and Ella, twelve—and takes refuge on Burke's Island, a craggy spit of land off the coast of Maine. Settled by Irish immigrants, the island is a place where superstition and magic are carried on the ocean winds, and wishes and dreams wash ashore with the changing tides.
Nora spent her first five years on the island but has not been back to the remote community for decades—not since that long ago summer when her mother disappeared at sea. One night while sitting alone on Glass Beach below the cottage where she spent her childhood, Nora succumbs to grief, her tears flowing into the ocean. Days later she finds an enigmatic fisherman named Owen Kavanagh shipwrecked on the rocks nearby. Is he, as her aunt's friend Polly suggests, a selkie—a mythical being of island legend—summoned by her heartbreak, or simply someone who, like Nora, is trying to find his way in the wake of his own personal struggles?
Just as she begins to regain her balance, her daughters embark on a reckless odyssey of their own—a journey that will force Nora to find the courage to chart her own course and finally face the truth about her marriage, her mother, and her long-buried past.
From Booklist
Starred Review Nora Cunningham brings her daughters to Burke’s Island in New England to escape the scandal surrounding her politician husband’s affair. Her aunt Maire is thrilled, but not all of the residents are so welcoming. The silence surrounding the long-ago disappearance of Maeve, Nora’s mother, not to mention the sudden appearance of a shipwrecked man with no memory, is a dark current propelling the story forward. Ella, Nora’s 12-year-old, misses her father fiercely, but 7-year-old Annie is drawn to the sea and, especially, a strange young boy named Ronan. The writing elevates this story above the usual wronged-mother-finds-herself story, and the harsh and, in the right hands, productive island is a character in itself. Readers who require strict realism may be turned off by the touch of the paranormal, but Barbieri does such a wonderful job setting up the beauty and mystery of the island and its rich Gaelic roots that it is not a stretch to ask the reader to imagine that the place is also magical. A wonderful, subtle, transporting story. For readers who enjoyed Sarah Addison Allen’s Garden Spells (2007) and Brunonia Barry’s The Lace Reader (2008). --Susan Maguire
Review
“Where Barbieri shines is in her depiction of the microcosm of the island and in the strong links between the generations. Nora discover that вЂ