Maine

This book is told from the drastically different viewpoints of four women in the Kelleher family.  First, there is Alice, the family matriarch.  She is dealing with unresolved issues of grief and guilt that extend back to an event that occurred when she was a teenager.  Then there is Kathleen, Alice’s daughter.  Kathleen is a recovering alcoholic who has worked her whole adult life, especially since her father died,  at removing herself, emotionally and physically, from the Kellehers.  Ann Marie is Kathleen’s sister-in-law who has strived for perfection, or the appearance of it, with her husband, children, and in-laws.  Maggie is Kathleen’s recently pregnant daughter who wants to have the civil relationships with her family members that others seem unable to achieve.  By crazy circumstance, and a little mischievousness, all four of these women end up at the family’s home in Maine at the same time one summer. 

These women are a mess.  Alice wants to be punished for the heinous event she blames herself for during her childhood; Kathleen wants to belittle everyone else’s inability to move away and become their own people; Ann Marie is petrified people will discover her marriage and her children aren’t perfect; and Maggie is struggling to figure out how to stop falling for and relying on bad men.  These women are driven by guilt, jealousy, vindictiveness, and spite. 

I struggled some with this book.  While the struggles of these women evoked strong emotional responses- sympathy, anger, frustration, fear- there didn’t appear to be much change.  I was hoping that the coming together of these women would lead to some communications and understandings that perhaps weren’t there before, but that happened only minimally.