The Cottage at Glass Beach

Author: Heather Barbieri
Goodreads Rating: 3.95
My Rating: 3 Stars
Pages: 306
Reviewed by: Nicole


This book was provided to me by the publisher as part of a TLC Blog Tour. Luckily for you, I already had a copy from my mother and so you can enter to win your own copy under the giveaway tab right up top. I was particularly drawn to this book because I love beaches and that cover just makes me wish I was where ever that was. 


Goodreads Synopses:


The author of The Lace Makers of Glenmara returns with the enthralling tale of a woman who, in the wake of scandal, flees to a remote island off the coast of Maine to reconnect with her past-and come to terms with the childhood tragedy that still haunts her

Married to the youngest attorney general in Massachusetts state history, forty-year-old Nora Cunningham is a picture perfect political wife and doting mother. But her carefully constructed life falls to pieces when she -along with the rest of the world - learns of her husband Malcolm's infidelity.

Humiliated, hurt, hounded by the press, Nora packs up her daughters, Annie, seven, and Ella, twelve, and takes refuge with her maternal aunt on Burke's Island, a craggy spit of land off the coast of Maine. Settled by Irish immigrants, the island is a place where superstition and magic are carried on the ocean winds, and wishes and dreams wash ashore with the changing tides.

Nora spent her first five years on the island but has not been back to the remote community for decades-not since that long ago summer when her mother disappeared at sea. One night, while sitting alone on Glass Beach, below the cottage where she spent her childhood, Nora succumbs to grief, her tears flowing into the ocean. Days later she finds an enigmatic fisherman, Owen Kavanagh, shipwrecked on the rocks nearby. Is he, as her aunt's friend Polly suggests, a selkie, a mythical being of island legend, summoned by her heartbreak; or simply someone who, like Nora, is trying to find his way in the wake of his own personal struggles?

Just as she begins to regain her balance, her young daughters embark on a reckless odyssey of their own, a journey that will force Nora to find the courage to chart her own course-and finally face the truth about her marriage, her mother, and her past.


Check out my review after the jump.
I am not a big fan of books that leave questions unanswered and this book did just that. We're introduced to the mystery of what happened in her marriage and what made Nora's father make her hate her estranged aunt. Then there was the question of what happened to Nora and her mother when her mom went missing and Who exactly was Owen Kavanagh? 


Almost none of those questions got answered in the book. While I wasn't a fan of the book and its ending I have to give Barbieri credit because it was a well written book. I felt compassionate for Nora as she struggled to try to keep her daughters happy and unaffected by the problems in her marriage. Even though she did fail, she tried to do what any good mother would, protect them from a father who seemed to care more about his mistress than his children.


When I started the book, I was a little hesitant because there was something about the writing that made me drag the book out a little longer than I wanted to, but I couldn't put my finger on what it was that made me feel that way. I still can't. I was rooting for the characters as Nora tried to help her children find a home away from home and for Maire who was trying to re-establsih a relationship with what is left of her family.


I felt that the book didn't really explore all of the aspects that were introduced to it. As a reader you come into the tail end of Nora's relationship with her husband, and you never learn the details about what happened between them. We also only get snippets of what happened with her mom, and then when we kind of get an answer we're given more questions.


Overall, I think I was more let down by this book because I had high hopes for it. I felt like I went into this expecting one thing and got another. If you're interested in this book, you can head over to the giveaway's tab and see how you can win your own Advanced copy of The Cottage at Glass Beach.