Title: Haven PointAuthor: Virginia Hume
Published by: St. Martin's Press on Jun. 8, 2021
Genres: General Fiction, Women's Fiction
Pages: 384
Format: ARC, Paperback
Source: Raincoast Books
Book Rating: 8.5/10
A sweeping debut novel about the generations of a family that spends summers in a seaside enclave on Maine’s rocky coastline, for fans of Elin Hilderbrand, Beatriz Williams, and Sarah Blake.
1944: Maren Larsen is a blonde beauty from a small Minnesota farming town, determined to do her part to help the war effort––and to see the world beyond her family’s cornfields. As a cadet nurse at Walter Reed Medical Center, she’s swept off her feet by Dr. Oliver Demarest, a handsome Boston Brahmin whose family spends summers in an insular community on the rocky coast of Maine.
1970: As the nation grapples with the ongoing conflict in Vietnam, Oliver and Maren are grappling with their fiercely independent seventeen-year-old daughter, Annie, who has fallen for a young man they don’t approve of. Before the summer is over a terrible tragedy will strike the Demarests––and in the aftermath, Annie vows never to return to Haven Point.
2008: Annie’s daughter, Skye, has arrived in Maine to help scatter her mother’s ashes. Maren knows that her granddaughter inherited Annie’s view of Haven Point: despite the wild beauty and quaint customs, the regattas and clambakes and sing-alongs, she finds the place––and the people––snobbish and petty. But Maren also knows that Annie never told Skye the whole truth about what happened during that fateful summer.
Over seven decades of a changing America, through wars and storms, betrayals and reconciliations, Virginia Hume’s Haven Point explores what it means to belong to a place, and to a family, which holds as tightly to its traditions as it does its secrets.
Review:
Tragic, nuanced, and moving!
Haven Point is a heartfelt, alluring story that immerses you into the lives of the Larsen family, especially three women, and all the secrets, smiles, tears, wounds, compassion, misery, and strength that has surrounded them through the years.
The prose is fluid and expressive. The characters are wounded, stubborn, and secretive. And the plot is a tender tale about life, loss, love, grief, forgiveness, familial drama, friendship, courage, hope, romance, and the unbreakable ties that bind us as family.
Overall, Haven Point is an immersive, compelling, multi-generational family saga by Hume that reminds us that life is a combination of all the complicated, messy, challenging, heartbreaking moments, as well as all the wonderful, special, lovely times that happen in-between.
This book is available now.
Pick up a copy from your favourite retailer or from one of the following links.
Thank you to Raincoast Books for providing me with a copy in exchange for an honest review.
About Virginia Hume
Virginia Hume is a freelance writer and editor. Her early career was spent in politics and public affairs. She lives outside Washington, D.C. with her husband, their daughters, and an under-groomed bichon named Chester.
Photo by David Baratz.
