📖 Book Review ~ A Week at the Shore by Barbara Delinsky

Sphere
18 March 2021

My thanks to the publishers for my copy of this book

New York Times bestselling author Barbara Delinsky explores how lives and relationships are forever changed when three sisters reunite at their family Rhode Island beach house.

It’s been twenty years since Mallory left home, running from the scandal that tore her family apart and ended her relationship with her first love. But now her father is sick, and Mallory, along with her estranged sisters, must return to the lives they left behind.

Soon after her arrival, Mallory bumps into Jack, the only man she’s ever loved and the reason she left town. Jack is different now, no longer the rebel she once knew, but as much as the pair wish to reconnect, the secrets that tore them apart decades ago continue to divide them.

While caring for her father and trying to repair her rocky relationship with her sisters, Mallory, with Jack’s help, chases down answers about the scandal that separated them. Could it be that the truth they’re seeing lies much closer to home?

📖 My thoughts..

After receiving a disturbing phone call about her father, Mallory Aldiss returns to Rhode Island after an absence of twenty years. The Aldiss family are complicated, especially as hints of a scandal twenty years ago still lingers in the shadows. Mallory's relationship with her elderly father is fractured and whilst he is pleased to see Mallory and his young teenage granddaughter, he  seems unsettled, and his growing confusion only heightens the family tension. Being back home in Bay Bluff brings back all the complicated reasons of just why Mallory left twenty years ago, and when she meets again with her ex-boyfriend, everything that she had buried so carefully comes back to haunt her. 

It takes a while for the story to get going but the author maintains her usual style for slow and considered writing. The careful veneer with which the Aldiss family have surrounded themselves forms the heart of the story, old resentments linger and family secrets threaten to overshadow everything and it's only by confronting her problems will Mallory ever be able to move on with her life.

Set against the glorious background of the Rhode Island coastline which the author describes so beautifully I feel as if my feet touched the sand and walked alongside Mallory as she attempts to make sense of how her life had taken her back to this moment. 

A Week at the Shore carefully rolls out family secrets which, once revealed, can never be hidden again.

About the Author

Barbara Delinsky lives in Needham, Massachusetts. With thirty million copies of her novels in print, in twenty-five different languages, Delinsky is one of the world’s most beloved and revered storytellers. A lifelong New Englander, she uses the area as settings in most of her stories. In her spare time, Barbara enjoys kayaking, aerobics and needlepoint, in addition to spending time with family and friends. She is also a breast cancer survivor, and strives to be a positive role model for other women facing the disease.

Twitter @BarbaraDelinsky #AWeekAtTheShore

@LittleBrownUK