So Happy Together By Maryann McFadden

From the author's website: Secrets and dreams…Everyone in the Noble family has them. Not that they’re telling each other. But when they’re lured to Cape Cod by the fabled light, three generations of Noble women find that sometimes it’s the dreams that hold us back, and the realities that set us free.

This book started out a little slow for me but became increasingly more interesting until at the end, I couldn't put it down. At the beginning the characters seemed stock, as if she just pulled them off the shelf - wayward daughter, crotchety old man, slimy salesman - and the big plot twist was absolutely predictable. But then the novel takes a turn, and the author starts to reveal more layers to the characters and they become interesting. I liked the main character, Claire, from the get go. Even when I was not yet hooked at the start, I still cared about her and would have kept reading just to find out how her story played out (not just because I felt compelled to finish the ARC for review!). I like relationship books and this book was foremost about the relationships within this family. But it also had some information woven in about the geography and history of the area and the conflict within the community between commercial fisherman and ecologists. That was mimicked in Claire's possible relationships as one beau was a developer and one was a preservationist. Very black hat, white hat. There was enough of that factual/informational part of the story to make me feel like I learned something but not so much that it felt preachy or heavy-handed. Overall, a great read once it gets going! I gave it four stars on Library Thing.


I read this book for the Library Thing Early Reviewers program.