In ever-tender and elegant prose, Mary-Beth Hughes masterfully explores the emotional consequences of loss and the saving graces of love.ĮXCERPT: And maybe this is where the story begins. Including stories from an array of characters orbiting Faith's family, The Ocean House weaves an exquisite world of complicated family tales on the Jersey Shore. The three generations of women hover between wishful innocence and a more knowing resilience against the cruelty that hidden secrets of the past propel into the present. Faith dismisses her mother's stories as bids for attention. She slips in and out of clarity, telling lucid tales of her own troubled youth. Meanwhile, her grandmother, Irene, is in the early stages of dementia. A fresh-faced student with a shaved head and new boyfriend, Cece has become a force of her own. Years later, Faith and her mother, Irene, visit Cece in college. What begins as a promising start to a redemptive relationship between the two ends in a tragedy that lands Faith in a treatment facility, leveled by trauma. As a member of a staid old beach club in her town and a self-made business consultant, she is appalled when her brother-in-law sends her an unruly, ill-mannered teenager named Lee-Ann who appears more like a wayward child than competent help. Faith, a mother of two young children, Cece and Connor, is in need of summer childcare.
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