Sea Glass Summer

December 10, 2012
Cannell takes a break from her Ellie Haskell cozy mystery series (She Shoots to Conquer, etc.) with this sweet contemporary romance featuring 34-year-old Sarah Draycott, a successful designer of patterns for knitting magazines. After her husband leaves her for another woman, Sarah moves from the Midwest to Sea Glass, Maine, to make a new start. In Sea Glass, Sarah encounters nosy neighbors and, eventually, an unexpected love interest. While descriptions of the beauties of nature enchant (“It was a perfect morning in early July, with just enough breeze to edge the deep blue silk of the bay with ripples of lacey foam”), readers should be prepared for some sentimental exchanges between new lovers (“I fell in love with you when we met. And if that’s equally like a romance novel, it’s because most clichés are around because they are truths that have been sanded and buffed over time”). Agent: Meg Ruley, Jane Rotrosen Agency.

October 15, 2012
Sarah is still reeling from an unexpected and painful divorce. She moves to a sleepy coastal village and buys the first house she sees. Almost immediately, Sarah meets a wide variety of people whose lives entwine and converge with her own, and ultimately everyone's circumstances change. There are Gwen, who is caring for an adult son with early-onset Alzheimer's; Nellie, a nosy eightysomething who consults spirit guides and carries a cane she doesn't need; and nine-year-old Oliver, who moves into the old Cully mansion with his aunt and uncle because his grandfather, who is his legal guardian, can no longer care for him. Cannell is best known for her cozy mysteries (She Shoots to Conquer, 2009), but coziness doesn't translate quite as well here. The charming village and overly nice, one-dimensional characters doing very nice things for each other feel forced when not anchored by a solid mystery. Cannell does create a mini-mystery surrounding the possibly haunted Cully mansion and the not-nice behavior of Oliver's aunt and uncle, and this is when the novel shines.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)