Publisher's Weekly Review
A young boy obsessed with a haunted beach shack searches for meaning amid catastrophic loss in National Book Award-finalist Godwin's (Flora) chilling novel. After Marcus's mother dies, the 11-year-old leaves with his great-aunt Charlotte to live on a small South Carolina island. Marcus receives little comfort from the laconic, reclusive painter, but falls easily into an unexpected role as her caretaker and companion. Analytical beyond his years but lacking an adult's skepticism, Marcus becomes entranced by the ramshackle cottage that Charlotte has painted for countless commissions over the years. After being told a family had disappeared there 50 years earlier, Marcus seeks answers long buried by time. The book moves between the fantastical and the everyday with ease; Marcus is just as likely to shop for his elderly neighbors as to whisper encouragement to loggerhead hatchlings or offer friendship to the restless spirits of the island. But nothing and no one on the island can break free of the forces that build and destroy, that give life and bring death. As time pushes him forward, Marcus must decide how to grieve: to raze his identity completely or memorialize his tragedies. His choice and its consequences will echo with readers, and Godwin's forceful prose captivates with the quiet, renewing power of a persistent tide. Agent: Moses Cardona, John Hawkins and Associates. (June) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
Spirits of all types haunt characters in Godwin's latest examination of grief and loss.Cast adrift after the death of his devoted single motherwho had not yet revealed the identity of his fatherpreternaturally self-aware 11-year-old Marcus finds himself in the care of his enigmatic great-aunt, Charlotte, a reclusive painter and inhabitant of a coastal South Carolina island. With an entire summer to adjust to life in his new situation before school starts, Marcus endeavors to make sense of his present surroundings as well as his past. His attentions focus on Grief Cottage (the site of a local tragedy) and the caretaking efforts undertaken each year by island residents to ensure the safe passage of hatching sea turtles as they journey to the ocean. Marcus' fascination with the ghostly presence of an adolescent boy, thought to have perished at Grief Cottage in a hurricane, allows Godwin (Publishing: A Writer's Memoir, 2015, etc.) to explore themes of loss, connection, and growth unfettered by the corporeal world. A cast of island denizens and old friends aids Marcus in his quest to understand his place in the world and illustrates the concept of family as he searches for the reality of it. Readers willing to suspend disbelief in the paranormal occurrences facing the pubescent Marcus may still struggle with the unusually high levels of awarenessof self and othersin his narration, relatively rare traits in a character his age. Echoes of the mysterious isolation in Marcus' family's past sound throughout the novel, suggesting that home and family may best be experienced as we create them, not as we expect them. Godwin approaches many of her usual melancholic themes from a different angle and raises the question of whether we get what we want or we get what we need. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Critically acclaimed and best-selling Godwin follows Flora (2013) with another involving tale about a displaced child of the South, this time bringing her signature psychological and social acuity to an intricately revealing ghost story. Orphaned at 11, Marcus is delivered to his only living relative, his great-aunt Charlotte, whom he has never met. Artist Charlotte has long lived in solitude on a South Carolina island, supporting herself by selling her moody paintings of the seashore, especially of the so-called Grief Cottage, an evocative ruin. Over this disorienting summer, Marcus becomes obsessed with the tragic story of the boy who lived in the cottage with his parents 50 years ago until they all disappeared in a hurricane. As flinty Charlotte wrestles with newly rekindled and traumatizing memories, her drinking problem worsens. Harboring his own dark secrets and worries, smart and sensitive Marcus helps guard a nest of endangered sea-turtle eggs and visits Grief Cottage to commune, even as he fears for his sanity, with the ghost of the lost boy. With intriguingly eccentric supporting characters and a dramatic setting, Godwin's riveting and wise story of the slow coalescence of trust and love between a stoic artist and a grieving boy, and of nature's glory and indifference, subtly and insightfully explores different forms of haunting and vulnerability, strength and survival. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Word will spread quickly about Godwin's tender and spellbinding supernatural novel.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2017 Booklist
