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Summary
Summary
On the day her daughter leaves for college, Anne Colwater's husband of twenty years announces he wants a divorce. Her roles of wife and mother suddenly gone, Annie retreats to her childhood home of Mystic, Washington, to heal. There she finds her old friend Nick, suddenly widowed and unable to cope with his emotionally scarred young daughter, Izzie. Annie agrees to look after Izzie, and soon finds herself caring for both father and daughter with a joy and passion she never expected - and she finds her love returned with a fervor she had never even hoped for. But love is never simple, and it is not until Annie learns a hard lesson from her own grown daughter that she finds the strength to claim the happiness she has earned.
Author Notes
Kristin Hannah was born in Southern California in September 1960. Before becoming a full-time writer, she worked in an advertising agency and practiced law in Seattle.
Hannah and her mom began writing a novel together when her mother was suffering from cancer. When her mother died, she put the draft away and continued to practice law. While pregnant with her son, and on bed rest, she took out the draft that she and her mother had written and began to write in earnest. Her draft was done by the time she gave birth. In 1990, she became a published writer and has been writing ever since.
She has won numerous awards including the Golden Heart, the Maggie and 1996 National Reader's Choice award. In 2004, she won the Rita Award for Best Novel: Between Sisters. Her title Winter Garden made the New York Times Bestseller List for 2011. Many of Hannah's other titles have made the New York Times Bestsellers List since then including: Night Road, Home Again, Home Front, Fly Away, The Nightingale, Comfort and Joy, True Colours, and The Great Alone. She has written a series entitled Girls of Firefly Lane which includes the books, Firefly Lane, and Fly Away.
Two of her books are being made into feature films, The Nightingale, and Home Front.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
In her first hardcover after a distinguished career in paperback romance (Home Again), Hannah shows what it takes for an author to make that defining leap. Never one to gush, she is more than ever disciplined in her writing, and the result is a clean, deep thrust into the reader's heart. Annie Colwater knows she's in for a spell of loneliness when her 17-year-old daughter, Natalie, leaves Southern California for a summer in London, but the teary airport farewell is just the beginning of a chaotic time. Blake, Annie's husband, tells her that he wants a divorce so he can start a new life with his sweetheart, a young partner in his law firm. Blake's a cada habitual philanderer, and the sort of father who forgets birthdaysbut we don't totally blame him for bailing out. Annie is Natalie's doting mother, Blake's dutiful wife and otherwise barely there. In search of the self she must find to survive, Annie goes back to Mystic, Wash., and the home of her father, gruffly loving Hank Borne, who did his best to raise her after the early death of her mother. Maternal loss is a terrain Hannah seems to know to a harrowing fare-thee-well. Annie's redemption begins with her profound kindness to six-year-old Isabella Delacroix, whose mother, Kathyonce Annie's best friendhas recently died. A romance with alcoholic cop Nick, Isabella's father, unfolds tenderly and with suspense, for all its inevitability. When Annie discovers she is pregnant with Blake's child, and then gives birth prematurely to a tiny girl who may not survive, the phrase "page-turner" is redefined. In Hannah's world, nothing can be taken for granted and triumph must be earned, with hard work, truthful reckoning and tears. 100,000 first printing; first serial to Good Housekeeping; Literary Guild and Doubleday Book Club selections; film rights optioned by Hearst Entertainment; rights sold in the U.K., Germany, France, Sweden and China. (Mar.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
As Annie Colwater approaches 40, she thinks her life is perfect. She has a terrific daughter about to go away to college and is married to a very successful Southern California attorney. Her dream is that when their daughter leaves the nest, she and her husband will rediscover each other and rekindle their love, but Blake has other ideas. Right after they see their daughter's plane off, he informs Annie that he wants a divorce because he's found someone else. Annie's life is shattered. If she's no longer needed as a wife and a mother, then who is she? Devastated, she decides to go back to Mystic, her hometown nestled in the rain forest of Washington State. While staying with her father, she finds out that her old friend Nick is a widower and needs help taking care of his six-year-old daughter. This fills the void in Annie's life, and she soon becomes very attached to Nick and Izzy and reconciled to her impending divorce. But after Blake shows up and tells her that he wants her back, Annie must decide whether she should return to her old life or stay with Nick, whom she has grown to love. Fortunately, Annie has help from her daughter, who is wise beyond her years. Romance author Hannah, who has made a very successful transition from paperback to hardcover, delivers an extremely satisfying, insightful, and emotional tale. Fans of La Vyrle Spencer will certainly enjoy this moving book. --Patty Engelmann
Kirkus Review
Hannah, after eight paperbacks, abandons her successful time-travelers for a hardcover life of kitchen-sink romance. Everyone must have got the Olympic Peninsula memo for this spring because, as of this reading, authors Hannah, Nora Roberts, and JoAnn Ross have all placed their newest romances in or near the Quinault rain forest. Here, 40ish Annie Colwater, returns to Washington State after her husband, high-powered Los Angeles lawyer Blake, tells her he's found another (younger) woman and wants a divorce. Although a Stanford graduate, Annie has known only a life of perfect wifedom: matching Blake's ties to his suits and cooking meals from Gourmet magazine. What is she to do with her shattered life? Well, she returns to dad's house in the small town of Mystic, cuts off all her hair (for a different look), and goes to work as a nanny for lawman Nick Delacroix, whose wife has committed suicide, whose young daughter Izzy refuses to speak, and who himself has descended into despair and alcoholism. Annie spruces up Nick's home on Mystic Lake and sends ``Izzy-bear'' back into speech mode. And, after Nick begins attending AA meetings, she and he become lovers. Still, when Annie learns that she's pregnant not with Nick's but with Blake's child, she heads back to her empty life in the Malibu Colony. The baby arrives prematurely, and mean-spirited Blake doesn't even stick around to support his wife. At this point, it's perfectly clear to Annie'and the reader'that she's justified in taking her newborn daughter and driving back north. Hannah's characters indulge in so many stages of the weeps, from glassy eyes to flat-out sobs, that tear ducts are almost bound to stay dry. (First printing of 100,000; first serial to Good Housekeeping; Literary Guild/Doubleday book club selections)
Library Journal Review
Paperback romance writer Hannah (Home Again, LJ 11/15/96) breaks into the hardcover mainstream with this novel. Annie finds herself abandoned after 20 years by a faithless husband and a college-bound daughter. Having no identity of her own after spending her life nurturing them, she returns to her native Mystic, a logging town in Washington State. There she finds her old high school beau in crisis after his wife's suicide. His depression prevents him from caring for his small daughter, Izzy, who is also emotionally troubled. Annie is able to find meaning again through nurturing others, but this time she learns to rely on her own inner strength. The grieving father battles alcoholism while Annie restores Izzy's mental health, and, as the characters heal, the old romance is rekindled. Fans of Anne Rivers Siddons will devour this. With heavy publicity, including book club selection, a magazine serial, and optioned film rights, expect demand. Highly recommended for all collections. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 11/1/98.]Carol J. Bissett, Dittlinger Memorial Lib., New Braunfels, TX (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
From Part One The true voyage of self-discovery lies not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes. --Marcel Proust Chapter 1 Rain fell like tiny silver teardrops from the tired sky. Somewhere behind a bank of clouds lay the sun, too weak to cast a shadow on the ground below. It was March, the doldrums of the year, still and quiet and gray, but the wind had already begun to warm, bringing with it the promise of spring. Trees that only last week had been naked and brittle seemed to have grown six inches over the span of a single, moonless night, and sometimes, if the sunlight hit a limb just so, you could see the red bud of new life stirring at the tips of the crackly brown bark. Any day, the hills behind Malibu would blossom, and for a few short weeks this would be the prettiest place on Earth. Like the plants and animals, the children of Southern California sensed the coming of the sun. They had begun to dream of ice cream and popsicles and last year's cutoffs. Even determined city dwellers, who lived in glass and concrete high-rises in places with pretentious names like Century City, found themselves veering into the nursery aisles of their local supermarkets. Small, potted geraniums began appearing in the metal shopping carts, alongside the sun-dried tomatoes and the bottles of Evian water. For nineteen years, Annie Colwater had awaited spring with the breathless anticipation of a young girl at her first dance. She ordered bulbs from distant lands and shopped for hand-painted ceramic pots to hold her favorite annuals. But now, all she felt was dread, and a vague, formless panic. After today, nothing in her well-ordered life would remain the same, and she was not a woman who liked the sharp, jagged edges of change. She preferred things to run smoothly, down the middle of the road. That was where she felt safest--in the center of the ordinary, with her family gathered close around her. Wife. Mother. These were the roles that defined her, that gave her life meaning. It was what she'd always been, and now, as she warily approached her fortieth birthday, it was all she could remember ever wanting to be. She had gotten married right after college and been pregnant within that same year. Her husband and daughter were her anchors; without Blake and Natalie, she had often thought that she might float out to sea, a ship without captain or destination. But what did a mother do when her only child left home? She shifted uneasily in the front seat of the Cadillac. The clothes she'd chosen with such care this morning, navy wool pants and a pale rose silk blouse, felt wrong. Usually she could take refuge in fashionable camouflage, by pretending to be a woman she wasn't. Designer clothes and carefully applied makeup could make her look like the high-powered corporate wife she was supposed to be. But not today. Today, the waist-length brown hair she'd drawn back from her face in a chignon--the way her husband liked it, the way she always wore it--was giving her a headache. She drummed her manicured fingernails on the armrest and glanced at Blake, who was settled comfortably in the driver's seat. He looked completely relaxed, as if this were a normal afternoon instead of the day their seventeen-year-old daughter was leaving for London. It was childish to be so scared, she knew that, but knowing didn't ease the pain. When Natalie had first told them that she wanted to graduate early and spend her last quarter in London, Annie had been proud of her daughter's independence. It was the sort of thing that seniors at the expensive prep school often did, and precisely the sophisticated sort of adventure Annie had wanted for her daughter. Annie herself would never have had the courage for so bold a move--not at seventeen, not even now at thirty-nine. Travel had always intimidated her. Although she loved seeing new places and meeting new people, she always felt an underlying discomfort when she left home. She knew this weakness was a remnant of her youth, a normal by-product of the tragedy that had tainted her childhood, but understanding her fear didn't alleviate it. On every family vacation, Annie had suffered from nightmares--dark, twisted visions in which she was alone in a foreign land without money or direction. Lost, she wandered through unfamiliar streets, searching for the family that was her safety net, until, finally, sobbing in her sleep, she awoke. Then, she would curl into her husband's sleeping body and, at last, relax. She had been proud of her daughter's independence and courage in choosing to go all the way to England by herself, but she hadn't realized how hard it would be to watch Natalie leave. They'd been like best friends, she and her daughter, ever since Natalie had emerged from the angry, sullen rubble of the early teen years. They'd had hard times, sure, and fights and hurt feelings, and they'd each said things that shouldn't have been said, but all that had only made their bond stronger. They were a unit, the "girls" in a household where the only man worked eighty hours a week and sometimes went whole days without remembering to smile. She stared out the car window. The concrete-encrusted canyons of downtown Los Angeles were a blur of high-rise buildings, graffiti, and neon lights that left streaking reflections in the misty rain. They were getting closer and closer to the airport. She reached for her husband, touched the pale blue cashmere of his sleeve. "Let's fly to London with Nana and get her settled with her host family. I know--" "Mom," Natalie said sharply from the backseat. "Get real. It would be, like, so humiliating for you to show up." Annie drew her hand back and plucked a tiny lint ball from her expensive wool pants. "It was just an idea," she said softly. "Your dad has been trying to get me to England for ages. I thought . . . maybe we could go now." Blake gave her a quick look, one she couldn't quite read. "I haven't mentioned England in years." Then he muttered something about the traffic and slammed his hand on the horn. Excerpted from On Mystic Lake by Kristin Hannah All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.