I listened to Maine rather than read it because there were over 300 holds on 34 copies in our ILL system, but I just happened to see the audiobook on the shelf! Lucky for me. I found myself keeping the earphones in for quite a while after the dogwalk ended just to see what those women would do and say next.

The book focuses on four women of a prosperous Irish Catholic family (grandmother Alice, her daughter Kathleen, Kathleen's daughter Maggie, and Alice's daughter-in-law Anne Marie) during a summer at their Maine beach house when everything is changing. The tale is told in third person, but in clusters of chapters of each of the four women's viewpoints -- similar to Barbara Kingsolver's The Poisonwood Bible. Just when you think you have things figured out, a different character tells her side of the story. The family is full of secrets -- some will get told, some not. There is resolution and some redemption by the end, but not as "happy ending" as Sullivan's first book, Commencement. The themes of family, the Catholic Church and its effect on its adherents, and the changing lives of women in this past century run through the book.

I have a few little quibbles -- what was this about grizzly bear cubs raiding the dumpsters in Southern Maine? I can only think that the parents told their children that raccoons were grizzly bears and the poor little suburban Mass. kids believed them. Also, Sullivan uses the device of the "unspoken thought" quite a bit -- someone will be talking to another person but thinking something else not as "appropriate." The audiobook reader, Anne Marie Lee, did an excellent job overall but it sometimes took a few minutes for me to realize that someone did not in fact say something out loud. In fairness though, that's a hard nuance to vocalize.

I wouldn't call this light beach reading, which seems to be how the publishers marketed it. But I certainly found it worth reading.