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Please note that I received this book via NetGalley. This did not affect my rating or review.
Not much to say about this one. This was a slow (very slow) book and you don't even get what is going on and then the book focuses on a mystery of a missing woman. I didn't really care for the hero (Jack) in this one (he was verbally abusive I found and just a jerk) and I thought the heroine (Mallory) could do better. I honestly think this whole thing read like a very bad soap opera with a lot of misconceptions that could have been fixed if all characters had a honest talk. I didn't like the resolution to the mystery (it was lame) and I think that not all characters were very developed.
"A Week at the Shore" follows Mallory Aldiss who after an irate phone call from a long-time ex family friend Jack Sabathian, returns to her family's home in Rhode Island. Jack calls Mallory accusing her father of threatening him with a gun and telling her she needs to return home and stop leaving things to her younger sister. Mallory is a photographer living in New York with her daughter Joy and has not been home in 20 years. Mallory is partially estranged from both of her sisters, one that still lives in Rhode Island, and her father Tom who is suffering from Alzheimer's disease. Mallory's family fell apart after their neighbor Elizabeth Sabathian disappeared after taking a boat trip with her father 20 years earlier. Many people thought that Tom and Elizabeth were having an affair. Jack accused him of murdering his mother and Jack and Mallory fell apart. The story just follows Jack and Mallory and the sisters with them talking through memories and the truth of their family.
I can just say that I compared this to other Delinsky books I loved and this just didn't hit the sweet spot for me. Mallory was a pushover and I really didn't like her hemming and hawing over everything. She let her 13 year old daughter push her around. She let Jack push her around. I just thought the reveals she tried to get to about her family fell flat.
The other characters were underdeveloped. Jack was a jerk IMHO. The two sisters were barely in this it felt like. I didn't really like Joy. The other characters who were in this just felt like ghosts. Usually Delinsky novels have some really well grounded characters with issues that feel very true to life.
The writing at times though was really good (why I gave this a 2). When Delinsky focuses on how memory shapes thing, Mallory's childhood memories, the beach, the smells and locations around Mallory things really work. This book made me think about my childhood and playing in the woods near a creek on summer days and the smell of the creek and the green of the woods. How I could hear bees buzzing and hear the birds chirping with the occasional noise from an animal in the underbrush. If Delinsky had more of that I would have loved this book.
The flow of this book was just terrible. I think other reviewers noted how slow this is, and it is really slow. You don't start to see resolutions to anything until the last 20 percent of the book. Things just felt rushed at that point and I was just glad to be done with this one.
