All The Things: Our June Book!
Because summer is the perfect time for a novel and this is one of the best.
What better time of year to read a novel together than summer?!
And man oh man, this is one of my very favorites—ever.
I shared hints in the ATT Instagram Stories and am so glad to officially tell you:
I’ve raved about it online a bunch of times, had conversations with friends about the characters and setting, and own all of Amanda’s other novels (Set the Stars Alight, Yours Is the Night, All the Lost Places). But this one, her debut? It’s a story about home and hope—and I still think about it four years later.
Re-reading it this month, once again, I laughed out loud and reached for Kleenex and read sentences out loud, appreciating the way she turns a phrase and brings words to life. (One small example: “When Abner talks, he stretches questions as far as they can get.”) If you were to tell me tomorrow that Ansel-by-the-Sea is a real place I could visit, that I could take a tour and meet Annie, I’d know in my mind it couldn’t possibly be true because #fiction but I’d want so much to be wrong. I think you’ll feel the same way by the end of the novel, that the people and the place will feel real to you too.
Thought it moves back and forth between two time periods, I found that I never wanted to leave one for the other . . . as in, I was so invested in the story of that page I wanted it to continue. What more could you ask for, really, than storytelling so rich that it was true of both timelines, each drawing me in time and again. I hope the same will be true for you!
Whose Waves These Are by Amanda Dykes
📒 Book description:
In the wake of WWII, a grieving fisherman submits a poem to a local newspaper: a rallying cry for hope, purpose...and rocks. When the poem spreads farther than he ever intended, Robert Bliss's humble words change the tide of a nation. Boxes of rocks inundate the tiny coastal Maine town, and he sets his calloused hands to work, but the building halts when tragedy strikes.
Decades later, Annie Bliss is summoned back to Ansel-by-the-Sea when she learns her Great-Uncle Robert, the man who became her refuge during the hardest summer of her youth, is now the one in need of help. What she didn't anticipate was finding a wall of heavy boxes hiding in his home. Long-ago memories of stone ruins on a nearby island trigger her curiosity, igniting a fire in her anthropologist soul to uncover answers.
She joins forces with the handsome and mysterious harbor postman, and all her hopes of mending the decades-old chasm in her family seem to point back to the ruins. But with Robert failing fast, her search for answers battles against time, a foe as relentless as the ever-crashing waves upon the sea.