Summary: Over the course of a summer in a wealthy Connecticut community, a forty-something woman and her college-age stepson's lives fall apart in a series of violent shocks. Cheryl has never been the right kind of country-club wife. She's always felt like an outsider, and now, in her mid-forties--facing the harsh realities of aging while her marriage disintegrates and her troubled stepson, Teddy, is kicked out of college--she feels cast adrift by the sparkling seaside community of Little Neck Cove, Connecticut. So when Teddy shows up at home just as a storm brewing off the coast threatens to destroy the precarious safe haven of the cove, she joins him in an epic downward spiral.
Booklist Reviews
Those tony beach communities that dot the flaunted real estate along the Connecticut and Long Island coasts have long been the source of wonder and desire. Inside their gates, however, things are hardly the stuff of such lust-filled dreams. Petty rivalries escalate between neighbors, paranoia over outsiders' access to "their" beachfront vistas fuel violent turf wars, and those old stand-bys drugs, alcohol, and sex destroy marriages and livelihoods. Told from the alternating points-of-view of Cheryl, a down-market trophy wife, and Teddy, her dissolute stepson, Waclawiak's novel exposes the underpinnings of Little Neck Cove for what they are: paltry, superficial facades that poorly mask any semblance of charity, tolerance, or humanity. As Cheryl's marriage dissolves and Teddy's addiction causes a life-changing accident, an impending hurricane destined to hit the community pales in comparison to the inner storms already brewing. With its spot-on characterizations, droll dialogue, and staccato pacing, Waclawiak's dark satire is a trenchant indictment of the country club set tempered by compassionately rendered portraits of two of its not entirely unwitting victims. Copyright 2014 Booklist Reviews.
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