The House on Fripp Island

February 10, 2020
Kauffman’s keen, atmospheric follow-up to The Gunners explores class, friendship, and dark family secrets. In the mid-1990s, Lisa and Scott Daly invite Lisa’s longtime friend Poppy Ford; her husband, John; and their kids to join them for an all-expenses-paid four-day trip to South Carolina’s Fripp Island. The Dalys’ wealth is a source of tension for the Fords, who are still driving an ’81 Dodge Omni and struggle to get by. Despite this, Lisa is eager to reconnect with Poppy while their children soak up the sun. Fourteen-year-old Rae Daly is instantly smitten with 17-year-old Ryan Ford, who is about to start college, and Ryan’s younger sister, Alex, makes fast friends with Rae’s little sister, Kimmy. However, a current of unease runs through time spent at the beach and boozy rounds of golf. Lisa suspects Scott is having an affair, Lisa and Poppy discover that a registered sex offender lives on the island, Ryan is secretive, and Rae simmers in quiet desperation. Perhaps inevitably, events spiral to a shocking conclusion. Kauffman’s characters leap off the page; her portrait of Rae, a girl who longs to be seen as a woman, is especially vivid, as is her rendering of Lisa and Poppy’s fraught yet affectionate relationship. Readers will devour this suspenseful summer drama. (June)Correction: An earlier version of this review incorrectly spelled the title of the author's previous book.

May 1, 2020
A summer vacation to the beaches of South Carolina reunites childhood friends Lisa and Poppy and their families, but when the week ends in tragedy, the survivors are left to untangle the secrets snarled just beneath the surface of their seemingly ordinary lives. Lisa and Scott Daly are rich and unhappy. Married almost 20 years, they've settled into a routine of petty irritations that contains neither passion nor interest in each other's lives. When they win an all-expenses-paid vacation to Fripp Island, South Carolina, at Scott's company's Christmas party, Lisa jumps at the chance to invite her best friend, Poppy, who has stayed in their hometown of Wheeling, West Virginia, and lives the kind of working-class life Lisa escaped with her marriage to Scott. From the first it's apparent that the families have brought their problems with them to the island. Lisa feels certain Scott is having an affair, one that he seems to be pursuing even on his family vacation. Poppy's husband, John, is recovering from a nagging back injury, but his reliance on pain medicine has Poppy up every night counting his pills. Poppy's oldest child, Ryan, an awkward but handsome boy primed to leave for college in the fall, spends more and more time immersed in mysterious projects, and Lisa's 14-year-old daughter, Rae, is a seething mass of hormones and fragile teenage ego. The younger girls, Poppy's Alex and Lisa's Kimmy, are at crossroads of their own, poised in the fraught territory between childhood and the first of their teenage years. Throw into the mix a handyman on the sex-offender registry and his long-distance-runner wife--the improbably named Keats and Roxie Firestone--and the mood of the week is a mix of emotional turmoil with the occasional golden moment of beachfront reconciliation. However, the opening chapter is narrated by the ghost of one member of these two families, describing the moment of their murder during that vacation from the vantage of 20 years in the future. With that in mind, the reader is primed to pick up all the tantalizing clues Kauffman weaves through her sometimes exposition-heavy prose. Our assumptions about whose tensions, desires, rages, and shy longings might erupt into murder are provoked and reversed right up until the final pages, when the mystery of Fripp Island is revealed. An entertaining and ultimately tender book.

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May 1, 2020
Lisa and Poppy grew up in the same small town, got married to husbands, and each had two children. Years later, their families spend a long weekend together in a beach house on Fripp Island, South Carolina. Lisa's moneyed family fits in; Poppy's hand-me-down family sticks out. Kauffman's (The Gunners, 2018) third literary novel is assured, enjoyable, and well crafted. In the prologue, readers learn that one member of the group will be murdered by the end of the trip, and the weight of who and why intensifies every interaction. This novel thoughtfully considers a complex system in which eight characters, each with fears, desires, and secrets, are contained in a single house. The reader enjoys the catbird seat, with a window into the interior lives of all. The beach comes alive as yet another character, and so does a local couple struggling to survive a stigma that's haunted them for years. The writing is deceptively simple, easy to read while illuminating what is difficult. This is both a whodunit and a pleasurable novel about human experience.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)