Alright, if you would delete all pages from about 30% to 75% this book might have gotten 4 stars.

First off, no one can identify with these characters. The women are all totally pessimistic and broken, the children are your typical American kids: spoiled brats and all the men have macho-man issues (with the exception of John Walsh, but we don't get to know him well enough). I understand that sometimes life gets you down and occasionally you might feel like there's nothing left except despair, but seriously, I just hate people who hide all their problems inside and then are surprised when they get sick physically. Like, Hello! You're internalizing all this poison and then you're surprised when your body reacts? Come on...

Secondly, the author sucked at writing. Perhaps some of her other books are better, but in this one (the first one I ever read by her) I just felt that it was very disjointed. She was aiming to go towards a slowly uncovering all the past, step by step, type of telling and instead I just felt bored out of my skull for the gist of the book. Yeah, we know Brenda hurt a painting. You've alluded to how it happened 12 times already. Now we get the full details described in 15 pages and yet I don't feel like I learned anything new.

There were a whole bunch of other, smaller, flaws as well. The author just writes about the setting as though we've all been there. I haven't. I don't even know where Nantucket it... except maybe that it's pretty far from Connecticut that you need to fly there. Caribbean? Canada level? Up near Greenland? In the Pacific? No clue! The only time I've ever even heard of the island were those bottled juice drinks they sold at specialty high-level stores and breakfast places made by Nantucket... presumably from the island but who knows? That aside, I figured out it was an island and not just a peninsula or a block of land a while of the way in.

So why did I give this book 2 stars, and not just 1? Well, the story itself wasn't bad. The premise was interesting and the flow wasn't horrendous. As an editor I would have cleaned up a bit (more?) and changed things and simplified other things, but in general, overall, the book wasn't bad.

I am still seething over the character depictions (very controversial at times!) and how much mind mud I had to slog through to get to the end of the novel. So I'll just try and focus on the beginning and how much more lovely that was in comparison to the rest of the book.

Not sure if I'll be picking this author up again.

P.S. This was a summer-read choice for my bookclub, Serious About Books.