The Silver Boat

January 3, 2011
In her sweet but unsurprising latest, perennial bestseller Rice (Deep Blue Sea for Beginners) links the fate of three sisters to that of their parents' summer home on Martha's Vineyard, where the sisters gather to clean out the house for its sale. Dar, Delia, and Rory McCarthy are the daughters of an heiress and a carpenter, a troublesome romance that ended when the eldest, Dar, was 12 and their father disappeared at sea. Now, decades later, Dar lives alone at the edge of the family property, channeling her grief into writing and her love into an affair. Delia and Rory are stuck in rocky marriages, and Delia's son, Pete, simply founders. After Dar finds some telling correspondence in the house, the sisters travel to Ireland to finally resolve the mystery of their father's disappearance. The answer helps them deal with the past, with current relationships, and with chances for future happiness (and gives them some leverage in selling the house). Rice enriches familiar themes of family, failure, redemption, and romance with a watercolor-lovely portrait of Martha's Vineyard and sketches of the tug-of-war between sea and sand, rich and poor, development and preservation characteristic of the island.

January 15, 2011

Three middle-aged sisters gather to consider the fate of their family property on Martha's Vineyard.

How does one family cope with the trauma of losing a 15-acre seaside spread that has been theirs since Colonial times? Especially if they are descended from the Daggetts, one of the founding families of Martha's Vineyard? After their mother passes away, the McCarthy sisters, Dar, Delia and Rory, converge on Daggett's Way, their rustic vacation home, to pack up memorabilia. Daggett's Way is listed for sale because the sisters can afford neither to maintain it nor pay spiraling property taxes and inheritance taxes. There is an offer on the table from obnoxious buyers who plan to tear the historic place down and construct a vulgar facsimile of a French chateau, complete with indoor pool. Particularly hard hit by the prospect of losing her birthright is eldest daughter Dar, a graphic novelist whose manga altar ego Dulse can affect reality in ways Dar can't. As for her sisters, Delia's marriage is threatened by son Pete's meth addiction. Rory, mother of three, compulsively cyberstalks her ex, Jonathan, who left her for a younger woman. Years before, the sisters' father, Michael McCarthy, an Irish immigrant boat-builder who always felt threatened by his Daggett in-laws' wealth, disappeared after a solo voyage to Ireland aboard his hand-crafted sailing sloop. Dar recalls that her father had some crazy notion that in 1625 or so King Charles I had granted his family a tract of land within the Daggett parcel's boundaries. Not stopping to worry about how it's going to help them prove that they have an ancient title to land they already own, the sisters head off to Ireland, where they learn that Michael's madness was indeed methodical. Rich veins of conflict go unmined, and the most interesting characters are peripheral, including Harrison, a dispossessed Vineyardite who copes in a most original way with the loss of his own family fiefdom.

Errs on the side of the pat and predictable.

(COPYRIGHT (2011) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

December 1, 2010

Best-selling contemporary women's fiction author Rice (Last Kiss) returns to publisher Pamela Dorman for her latest family drama, a story about three sisters and their personal struggles, their beloved summer family home, and unanswered questions about their long-departed father. Darrah, Delia, and Rory meet to pack up the Martha's Vineyard house they cannot afford to keep and decide to set off on a mission to Ireland to try to find out what happened to their father. But when they return home to face the future, they unexpectedly discover they want different things. Rice's story lines are compelling, and to her credit, she doesn't sugarcoat the unpleasant things people and families sometimes go through. However, depending on your point of view, her descriptive writing style is either leisurely or meandering. While some readers may savor the poetic imagery, others may grow impatient with it. VERDICT This novel is a satisfying and worthwhile ride if you don't mind taking the scenic route. [Ten-city author tour.]--Samantha J. Gust, Niagara Univ. Lib., NY

Copyright 2010 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

February 1, 2011
Dar McCarthy is expecting her sisters, Delia and Rory, to join her in Marthas Vineyard for a final visit to the family home before it has to be sold for taxes. Each of the sisters has taken a different path, and Dar is the only one remaining on the island. The house has been in the family for generations, and as the sisters reunite to pack up mementos, they broach the one subject that has haunted them, the disappearance of their father when they were young. Michael was an Irish immigrant shipbuilder, while their mother came from a prestigious New England family. Michael always maintained that his family had a land grant from the king of England on Marthas Vineyard. Driven by the need to prove his worth, he sailed to Ireland to look for the original deed. After unearthing love letters between her parents, Dar and her sisters go to Ireland on their own quest. Popular Rice, in her mellifluous style, captures the essence of family and sisterhood as each character deals with love and loss.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)