The Kellerhers have a summer home in Maine. The children grew up spending every summer there, the grandchildren as well. When the patriarch of the family dies the summer home become something split between the three children, no one spending the summer together any longer.
One summer finds four of the Kellerher women at the summer home at the same time. With nothing in common except the family bond and all four of them at different times and places in their lives, each of them coming to Maine for a different reason, they don’t make it easy on each other.
Alice is the matriarch of the family, still doing penance for the death of her sister almost sixty years ago. Kathleen is her headstrong oldest daughter who cannot forgive her mother the mistakes she has made. Maggie is Kathleen’s daughter, unmarried and pregnant. Then there is Ann Marie, Alice’s daughter in law and a caretaker and peacemaker through and through.
The four women all have their own pain and sorrow and they take it out on each other. Kathleen never wanted to go to the summer house again, as far as she is concerned her mother does nothing but make everyone miserable.
Ann Marie tries so hard to do the right thing, she is frustrated and feeling lost because all of her children have left the nest. She is hiding the fact that her children aren’t as perfect as her mother in law likes to believe, and that she herself has needs that aren’t being met.
The women bump heads over and over until Ann Marie does something that makes Kathleen realize that she is human, just like the rest of them.
Women’s relationships are difficult but none are more difficult than the ones of women who are related. You will see yourself in each of these women, bits and pieces will be familiar. As stern and selfish as Alice is, you will still feel for her over the loss of her sister and the loss of her dreams.
This is a good book that will make you take a second look at those difficult relationships you have in your own life.