Pirate Patty Reviews

Set in Maine’s coastal area during the late ’50s through the ’60s, this novel takes us through the lives of Margreete and her family.

Margreete is an independent woman who is slowly forgetting who she is and was. So when she accidentally starts a fire in her kitchen, her children know they need to do something. Margreet isn’t going anywhere as she flits through the book wondering what these people are doing in her house.

Her daughter Liddie and her husband and children move in with her to try and keep her in the house and out of a nursing facility. None of them are happy about it and soon we are dealing with an unhappy wife who just wants to play her cello, kids who are dealing with the turbulence that was the sixties, a husband who can’t be quiet about the Vietnam War and who cheats on his wife. All the while Margreete is fading into the background, almost forgotten herself.

Against the backdrop of all the craziness of the sixties, there were a lot of things happening in this book. But the one thing that wasn’t was communication. A very dysfunctional family dealing with a matriarch who doesn’t even know who they are. The question of when to let someone you love live a better life outside of their home is never an easy one. I felt so bad for Margreete and by the end of the book she was almost invisible.

NetGalley/ April 20, 2021 St. Martin’s Press