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.