Elise is out dancing the night before her college graduation when her younger sister Sophie calls to tell her their mom is nowhere to be found. Elise leaves on the next flight back to her childhood home, Nantucket Island, for the first time in nearly four years. When she arrives she discovers the ways in which her whip-smart little sister has had to make do without her.
The sisters soon learn that police stopped their mother on her way home from work and deported her to São Paulo, Brazil. Intent on bringing her back, Elise stays and secures the same job she had in high school: monitoring endangered birds that have laid eggs on a remote beach. Meanwhile, her best friend from college, Sheba—a gregarious socialite and heir to a famed children's toy company—reveals that she has inherited her grandfather’s summer mansion on Nantucket. What will Elise do when the …
Elise is out dancing the night before her college graduation when her younger sister Sophie calls to tell her their mom is nowhere to be found. Elise leaves on the next flight back to her childhood home, Nantucket Island, for the first time in nearly four years. When she arrives she discovers the ways in which her whip-smart little sister has had to make do without her.
The sisters soon learn that police stopped their mother on her way home from work and deported her to São Paulo, Brazil. Intent on bringing her back, Elise stays and secures the same job she had in high school: monitoring endangered birds that have laid eggs on a remote beach. Meanwhile, her best friend from college, Sheba—a gregarious socialite and heir to a famed children's toy company—reveals that she has inherited her grandfather’s summer mansion on Nantucket. What will Elise do when the new life she created in college collides with the life she left behind on the island? As she confronts the emotional and material realities that have fractured her family, she is confronted by a world in Brazil that her mother has had to leave behind, too.
A novel about issues that doesn’t hit you over the head with them: undocumented workers, “nice” white people and the harm they blithely cause, Nantucket’s tourist economy and the income inequality with the island’s locals. But it’s mainly about two sisters and the eldest’s rich friend.
Another contemporary book that disposes of quotation marks and indenting paragraphs for new speakers. WHY. Enjoyed it nonetheless.
