July 2024

I enjoy J. Courtney Sullivan's writing, so I was looking forward to reading THE CLIFFS. Here, she returns to Maine in a book that is full of character, history and stories woven together.

First, there is an abandoned house, one that Jane Flanagan, a teen with a less-than-happy home life, explores in her free time. Her imagination is in gear about who may have lived there and what their story was. Things seem hurriedly abandoned as if a family fled. There are clothes in closets and dishes in cabinets. But life moves on. And so does Jane.

But two decades later, Jane heads back to Maine from Boston with her tail between her legs. Readers come to learn how she upended both her marriage and her job. By now, her unbalanced mother has passed away, and she is charged with clearing her cluttered childhood house for sale.

As for Jane’s "passion home," it has been bought by a wealthy Beacon couple. Genevieve, the wife, is hellbent on modernizing it, thus stripping it of all its charm. Literally nothing is sacred in her eyes; the home, and the land around it, presents itself as a playground to her. But this will come with consequences.

Genevieve hires Jane, who is a Harvard archivist, to research the history of the property. In doing so, many secrets are discovered.

I will not share more about the story lest I spoil for readers the wonderful nuggets that Sullivan unpacks.

I read two-thirds of the book in a day, standing at the side of the pool. I was carefully protecting the pristine hardcover. Alas, during a moment when I was deep into the story, the Polaris, which crawls the bottom of the pool to clean it, whipped its tail up and assaulted some pages with a spray. It is fitting given how so many lives in this book pack their own sets of surprises.

You will want to talk about THE CLIFFS once you finish it!