Midcoast by Adam White and This Time Tomorrow by Emma Straub

 

Enjoying my Twenty Books of Summer very much.  Midcoast and This Time Tomorrow are my third and fourth books read on my list.

I ripped through The Midcoast by Adam White, his debut novel, eleven years in the making. Every time I turned around this past week, there it was, lying on the couch-side table, ready to be picked up and devoured, which I did, happily. “Compulsively readable” would be the blurb I would stick on its cover.

But, mind you, I must add a caveat—the first 40 pages made me question my decision to read this book. I floundered and worried all through the beginning, “Am I going to have to retire this book?”

 After a slow start, I needn’t have fretted. From then on, I zoomed through to the conclusion. The Midcoast is set in the coastal, very rural community of Damariscotta, Maine. The narrator Andrew grew up in the community, and though he attended prep school and college elsewhere in New England, he returns to raise a family. He ultimately devotes himself to investigating a crime family of sorts, people who have been part of his life since his youth. I have lots more to say about this novel, but worry about spoilers. Sigh!

I just finished This Time Tomorrow by Emma Straub, my fourth book from my 20 Books of Summer list. Overall I can say that I liked it, but I kept finding myself wanting to connect with it more, and I had been hoping to love it, given its subject matter of a good father/daughter relationship. At the beginning of the novel, Alice is forty and works as an admissions assistant in the Upper West Side private school that she once attended. Her father is very ill. She longs for a closer connection with him, and miraculously, travels back in time to her sixteenth birthday. There is a lot of time travel in this book, but I would say that it is not a “time-travel genre” book. I loved the depictions of the Upper West Side, my favorite place to hang-out in Manhattan.