On the surface, Melanie Kingstad-Keyes’s life is the picture of success. She’s a tenure track professor at a prestigious university and has a perfect husband. But a recent miscarriage has left her reeling and her marriage tenuous. Selling her family’s Lake Indigo summer home, which she hasn’t visited in fifteen years, feels like the perfect distraction from her problems. Now, she only needs to persuade her younger sister, Kelsey, to go along with her plan.
Stuck in a dead-end job, Kelsey Kingstad bounces from one doomed relationship to the next as she struggles to jumpstart her adult life. Carrying the guilt of her mother’s untimely death, Kelsey is reluctant to let go of the Victorian house filled with memories of her mom and their childhood.
Sisters Melanie Kingstad-Keyes and Kelsey Kingstad have decided to sell their family lake home, a house that has been in their family for a very long time. Even though they haven’t been there for fifteen years all the memories come rushing back when they go to clean it up for sale after their long-term renters have decided to move out. When they find a hidden door that magically transports them to the past, their mother’s past, they decide to use it to see their mother once again. Dead four years they miss her very much, but the things they discover shake them to their very foundations and they need to rethink everything they once took for granted.
Wow. This is quite the book, filled with flawed characters, truths, self-recriminations, and sibling rivalry. Family dynamics, you gotta love them, right? Melanie is laser focused on selling their summer home after her miscarriage rocks her to the core and Kelsey is a screw up on nearly all fronts. And really? She’s quite the brat. I can’t tell you how many times I wanted to smack her. She has quite a chip on her shoulder.
The push and pull between the sisters is so real, it’s like I’m living it. Though I don’t have sisters. I have much older brothers and we’ve never had such a contentious relationship. But that’s how good the writing is. I felt like I just knew what they each were going through.
The added dimension of the hidden door and the jaunts to their mom’s past is a great addition to what otherwise might have been a plodding book about sibling bickering. Now they have to focus on the staggering secrets their mom has kept all these years. And they have to decide if they are going to keep going through that door or stop altogether. And the whipped cream on top of the whole confection is: Kelsey doesn’t even really want to sell the house. The sisters have a lot to talk about and healing to do. If you like books with prickly family dynamics and secrets that rock the very foundations they’ve built their life on then do not pass this up.
No comments:
Post a Comment