June 12, 2017
Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Blais (In These Girls) affectionately recounts the summers she spent since the 1970s on Martha’s Vineyard in a small, unassuming cabin that lacked TV and a telephone. Purchased by her in-laws, the cabin became a place where Blais enjoyed relaxing vacations and was also a repository of her family’s history. Blais beautifully documents summers shared with family and friends enjoying unhurried days spent reading, visiting the quirky island towns, and basking in the natural environment. Blais weaves in a history of the island and its famous personages, its beauty, and its tourism-dependent economy. The author chronicles the island’s evolution from a rather remote and quiet place to one overwhelmed by megamansions, traffic, and weekenders’ noisy jets. The cabin was eventually sold, yet it retains its hold on Blais. When packing up for the last time, she laments the loss: “The value of what we could not take was astronomical. How do you pack a view? Can you fold it up, smoothing out the wrinkles, and then protect it with Styrofoam peanuts?” Blais has written a bittersweet account of a wonderfully unplugged summer life.
May 15, 2017
A Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author gives a familial face to the mystique of Martha's Vineyard in this unfailingly charming reminiscence of summers spent on the island.Blais (Journalism/Univ. of Massachusetts-Amherst; Uphill Walkers: A Memoir of a Family, 2001, etc.) chronicles the final days and robust history of a prominent family's time at their vacation home. The author makes clear she was not born into wealth, nor did she feel that marriage to John Katzenbach, son of former U.S. Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach, afforded her any special entitlements, on the Vineyard or anywhere else. Much more than an account of the privileged class enjoying its privileges, this story of the "shack" at Thumb Point is an engaging tale of a place that, for family or visiting friends, meant a leisurely but active lifestyle raised to an art form. "After a few days by the pond," she writes, "you became a happy animal, scampering barefoot, feral, and fortified." A great strength of the book are the author's portraits of her mother-in-law, the formidable Lydia, writer Phil Caputo, and publisher Katharine Graham, the latter sketch sounding a dirge on the decline of newspapers. Other principal players, including her husband, father-in-law, and year-round islanders, provide additional anecdotes. Readers will forgive the name-dropping because it is largely unavoidable; it serves as a gateway to a more complete picture of Vineyard culture, how seemingly fancy folk enjoy relatively modest lives in decidedly rustic surroundings. The book has the flavor of a finely observed travel book, with Blais offering a brief history of the island and a thorough inventory of its hierarchy, traditions, and manifest (sometimes eccentric) pleasures. In her hands, it is an endearingly quaint community, though not without a tinge of snob appeal, which she gamely dissects. If not quite as funny as billed, there remains much gentle humor and a certain elegiac sweetness that more than compensates--that, and a touching coda.
COPYRIGHT(2017) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
June 1, 2017
The Pulitzer Prizewinning author of In These Girls, Hope Is a Muscle (1994) pays tribute with affection and humor to the shabby but supremely well-located Martha's Vineyard house, owned by her in-laws, where she and her family spent two weeks every summer for many years, and which was sold after her husband's parents' death. Usually keeping nostalgia in witty check, while occasionally allowing it to shape a lyrical portrait of the place, she takes the reader on a verbal tour of the island, recalls weddings and a shocking death, comments on passages from the family logbook, and cites rules for the ideal guest ( Either like dogs, or pretend to ). She places their experience into the wider context of the island as a whole, as the spot where Teddy Kennedy's companion drowned after his car went off the bridge at Chappaquiddick, or where Jaws was filmed. Although the subject matter may be lightweight, Blais fills her book with sentences to savor and memories so clear they seem to become the reader's own.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)