Maine

Thanks to narrator Ann Marie Lee's Boston-Irish accents, listeners have no trouble buying into the background of the three generations of Kelleher women--Alice (the Greatest Generation), Kathleen and Ann Marie (Baby Boomers), and Maggie (Generation X)--who unexpectedly converge at the family's summer home in southern Maine for a couple of weeks one summer. Each has secrets, jealous relationships with other family members, a history with alcohol, and control issues. Although Lee's reading verges on being too animated, she captures the family tensions well. To outsiders, the Kellehers are charming and capable, but in private they harbor longstanding guilt and resentments and sometimes break out into bitter disagreements, especially over the future of the family property. Listeners become invested in the characters' lives, hoping the women find forgiveness and self-acceptance by summer's end. C.B.L. (c) AudioFile 2011, Portland, Maine

March 14, 2011
Sullivan follows debut Commencement with a summer spritzer that's equal parts family drama, white wine, and Hail Marys. The story follows the struggles of three generations of Kelleher women: drunken Alice, the mass-going matriarch; her rebel daughter, Kathleen, a Sonoma County farmer; Kathleen's sister-in-law, the dollhouse aficionado Ann Marie; and Kathleen's daughter, Maggie, an aspiring writer. Rather than allowing the characters to grow or the plot to thicken, the novel's conflict derives almost entirely from the airing (or not) of various grievances (Alice believes herself responsible for her sister's death; Maggie is pregnant, single, and terrified; Kathleen is still the bitter person she was before she sobered up; Ann Marie has a martyr complex). The Kelleher summer home on the Maine coast is the putative center around which the drama revolves, yet it is the women's common love for Daniel, the patriarch rendered faultless in death, who does the most to bring the women together. The book's tension is watered down at best, like a sun-warmed cocktail: mildly effective, but disappointing. When conflict finally does break the surface, the exhilaration is visceral but short-lived. Late in the story, Kathleen tells Maggie, "It's going to be okay," to which she responds, "It has to be." Unfortunately, the reader never gets much chance to worry otherwise.