The Captain's Daughter

June 5, 2017
Moore (The Admissions) continues to show off her tight storytelling skills with her latest, a tale about Eliza Barnes, a working-class girl who married into money and finds herself back in her Maine hometown to care for her dying father, Charlie. Having lost Eliza’s mother, Joanie, to cancer when Eliza was little, Charlie insists that he doesn’t want to undergo debilitating treatment for a brain tumor that will return to kill him anyway. Eliza alternates extended stays in Little Harbor with quick visits back to Barton, Mass., where her architect husband, Rob, is struggling with a difficult first-time client and insecurities pertaining to his family’s reliance on his mother’s money. Eliza proves a loving influence on her own children as well as on 17-year-old Mary Brown, the pregnant daughter of an old classmate whose older boyfriend Josh seems like trouble. Both Eliza and Rob face romantic temptation during their time apart, which is the least interesting part of a story that otherwise deftly mines issues of loyalty, class, and what it means to be a parent. Many readers will appreciate Moore’s moving novel, though parents might find it especially speaks to them.

May 15, 2017
Moore (The Admissions, 2015, etc.) offers a mildly thoughtful, mainly comforting slice of domestic pie in this story of a wealthy woman who temporarily returns to the working-class town of her youth.Eliza, a 37-year-old mother of two, has never felt completely at ease among her well-off neighbors in upscale Barton, Massachusetts, although her struggling architect husband, Rob, happens to be heir to a fortune and already owns a sailboat worth six figures. After receiving a call that her father has injured himself and needs her help, Eliza leaves her two daughters with Rob and drives to Little Harbor, Maine, only to discover that tough but good-hearted lobsterman Charlie's health problem is worse than she thought--a brain tumor. Staying longer than expected to care for Charlie, Eliza confronts the choice she made as a teen to leave her first sweetheart, Russell, and the simple life of Little Harbor in order to attend Brown University. She also confronts a not-very-surprising secret she and Russell, still in Little Harbor, have not discussed since their breakup. While avoiding her still-simmering attraction to Russell, Eliza bonds with Mary, a local 17-year-old facing a crisis similar to the one Eliza handled at the same age. Meanwhile, back in Barton, Rob is about to lose his only client, a referral from his mother, whom Eliza has always found overbearing. Rob also carries on a dangerous flirtation with Eliza's best friend. Less caddish than he sounds, Rob is a good father, loves Eliza, and is trying hard to be more than a spoiled rich kid; this is a novel in which everyone (with one cartoonishly villainous exception) is ultimately good-hearted and well-behaved. Moore raises some interesting issues about class and the importance of money to happiness, but by solving her characters' problems too neatly and painlessly she undercuts the novel's seriousness, turning it into a Lifetime matinee.

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June 15, 2017

Eliza Barnes is a stay-at-home mom in a community of yachts and country clubs in Massachusetts. She grew up around boats, but working lobster boats in a small fishing town in Maine, so she has an uneasy relationship with the wealth and privilege she married into. As the summer begins Eliza's father is diagnosed with a deadly illness, her daughters are entering their sulky, rebellious teen years, her husband is struggling to start his own business, and her mother-in-law throws around her wealth like a weapon. Through a series of fast-paced domestic events Eliza is forced to confront and rethink her life, dealing with issues like an old flame who still generates a spark, but who is kind and generous to her dying father, and a teenager in her old town who faces issues that Eliza dealt with at the same age. Moore (The Admissions) focuses on relationships, loss, and change though the eyes of warm and likable everywoman Eliza. VERDICT A summer read with boats, the ocean, and sunscreen but focused on the life-changing events and the power of love and family to deal with life's problems.--Jan Marry, Williamsburg Regional Lib., VA

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