Summer By The Sea - Susan Wiggs

Summer By The Sea

Susan Wiggs

Mira, May 26 2015, $14.95

ISBN: 9780778318538

"Celesta's by the Sea" owner Rosa Capoletti feels good for her BFF Linda whose beloved Jason just proposed to her.  However, Rosa’s happiness ends when “yachtis” from Newport arrive in her Winslow establishments for drinks.  Amongst them is the last person she ever wants to see, her teenage sweetheart Alex Montgomery who left one day without a word, never returning until now. 

Her dad was his affluent family gardener; so Rosa assumed theirs was a summer fling that could go nowhere.  Thus she focused on her highly regarded restaurant as the love of her life.  Alex informs her he is staying at his family summer home that has been vacant for over a decade.  She thinks back to when they first met and the subsequent summers afterward; he needs to tell her why he left a dozen years ago.  Family tragedies connect the gap.

Though the transition between past and present at times is difficult to follow, this is a reprint of a wonderful 2004 family drama.  The twenty-first century Romeo and Juliet couple is an absorbing pairing of old money Yankee and working class Italian-American.  Ironically it is not the social class difference that nuked their relationship, but a family tragedy that tore them apart and another family tragedy that may, if each is willing, give them a second chance.

Harriet Klausner