Summer By The Sea by Susan Wiggs

I'm sure Susan Wiggs had her reasons for switching from historicals to contemporaries. (I'll even give her the benefit of the doubt and assume she just wanted to write contemps, rather than following the market - although I can't blame any writer for doing what she has to in order to get sold.) But gosh, I miss her historicals. "Women's Fiction" is just not as satisfying to me as a straight-up romance. Thankfully I still have quite a few of her historicals in my TBR pile.

Summer By The Sea by Susan Wiggs
(2004, Contemporary) 3/31/08
Grade: 3.5

Ten years after their summer romance ended badly, Rosa Capoletti is surprised to see Alex Montgomery in her restaurant. He’s returned to his family’s summer house in the wake of his mother’s suicide, still hoping that he can make things up to Rosa. But can Rosa trust him again, after their summer friendship ended in disappointment and tragedy and changed her life forever?

Susan Wiggs does an excellent job in creating two memorable and understandable characters, as well as a strong sense of place. Within a few chapters, I felt like I knew the hero and the heroine (particularly the heroine), as well as their summer town and their roles within it. I settled in for a comfortable and enjoyable read. Unfortunately, pacing problems in the second half kept the book from reaching its potential. First, the second flashback (to their teenage love affair) went on far too long (over 100 pages), and meandered without really telling us anything new. Then, in the last section of the book, Wiggs turned on warp speed, and covered a book’s worth of melodrama in 30 pages, and with all of the shocking revelations crammed in, she didn’t have time to complete the romance in a satisfying way. Despite the well drawn characters and vivid descriptions, I ended up feeling a bit unsatisfied.

It's probably a good thing I'm not a writer. I'm sure I'd want to smack picky readers like moi, who always finds something to nitpick about and can't just "go with the flow". How annoying!

(I'm not counting the scientific papers I've contributed to - I don't think anyone reads "Identification of Anthranilic Acid Derivatives as a Novel Class of Allosteric Inhibitors of Hepatitis C NS5B Polymerase" for its literary value.)