On the coast of Alabama, there is a house cloaked in mystery, a place that reveals the truth and changes lives....
Ellie Calvin is caught in a dying marriage, and she knows this. With her beloved daughter away at college and a growing gap between her and her husband—between her reality and the woman she wants to be—she doesn’t quite seem to fit into her own life.
But everything changes after her controlling mother, Lillian, passes away. Ellie’s world turns upside down when she sees her ex-boyfriend, Hutch, at her mother’s funeral and learns that he is in charge of a documentary that involved Lillian before her death. He wants answers to questions that Ellie’s not sure she can face, until, in the painful midst of going through her mother’s things, she discovers a hidden diary—and a window into stories buried long ago.
As Ellie and Hutch start speaking for the first time in years, Ellie’s closed heart slowly begins to open. Fighting their feelings, they set out together to dig into Lillian’s history. Using both the diary and a trip to the Summer House, a mysterious and seductive bayside home, they gamble that they can work together and not fall in love again. But in piecing together a decades-old unrequited-love story, they just might uncover the secrets in their own hearts.
Coming Up for Air is the story of one woman’s search for truth—and what happens when love steps in along the way.
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"What a thought provoking book--I couldn't put it down. A mother dies unexpectedly and her 40 something daughter, who had a loving but strained relationship with her, finds her mother's journal. The revelations she finds there sends her on a journey--physical, and emotional-- to discover that part of her mother she had never known. Once the woman had been loving and open but to her daughter she had been restrained, constrained by the circumstances of her society and somewhat cold. The discovery of love betrayed and the way in which her mother shaped her life to deal with that betrayal causes the daughter to look more closely at her own marriage. What is love? Does it last forever? Can a true love be rejected and another substitute just as satisfactorily? What choices do we make in our lives and how do we live with those choices? Are there crossroads --such as this death and journal discovery--at which choices can be altered or accepted? These are just some of the questions that arise during the reading and others follow after the book is closed. I'm not sure I liked the pat ending to the book--it was possibly the only part that was unrealistic for me. The rest though probably occurs to women in mid
life more often than imagined.
The characters are well drawn--particularly the daughter and her husband--the others not as much. But then it is the daughter whose marriage is being impacted the most by the events of her mother's life, more so than by the interaction with the other characters."
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Katherine (4 out of 5 stars)