Indie Weekend: Water Music

Indie Weekend is my effort to help Indie Authors with marketing. Marketing is probably the biggest task authors have, and if I can help even a little, I’m happy to do it. You can help too by sharing this far and wide with your social media followers. Below please see a description, review, and buy links for Water Music by Marcia Peck.

BOOK DESCRIPTION

(From Amazon)

The bridge at Sagamore was closed when we got there that summer of 1956. We had to cross the canal at Buzzards Bay over the only other roadway that tethered Cape Cod to the mainland.

Thus twelve-year-old Lily Grainger, while safe from ‘communists and the Pope,’ finds her family suddenly adrift. That was the summer the Andrea Doria sank, pilot whales stranded, and Lily’s father built a house he couldn’t afford. Target practice on a nearby decommissioned Liberty Ship echoed not only the rancor in her parents’ marriage, a rancor stoked by Lily’s competitive uncle, but also Lily’s troubles with her sister, her cousins, and especially with her mother. In her increasingly desperate efforts to salvage her parents’ marriage, Lily discovers betrayals beyond her understanding as well as the small ways in which people try to rescue each other. She draws on her music lessons and her love of Cape Cod—from Sagamore and Monomoy to Nauset Spit and the Wellfleet Dunes, seeking safe passage from the limited world of her salt marsh to the larger, open ocean.

BOOK REVIEW

First of all, this is gorgeously written. The author has an amazing ability to convey feelings while describing the characters’ surroundings. For example… “I knew the temperature by sound and by feel: the hot dry ratchet of grasshoppers, low pressures that lifted the hairs on my arm, those moody overcast days with air as smooth and chill as pencil lead. In every sound and smell I dared find happiness, as if happiness were as prevalent as the taste of salt.”

Twelve-year-old Lily’s coming-of-age story finds her discovering truths and secrets about herself and her family, and it all unfolds in a sad and beautiful way during one Cape Cod summer in 1956. The author, in words, paints a picture of each character so well that they instantly appear in the mind’s eye. Relationship struggles between mother and daughter, husband and wife, brother to brother, and more are all laid out for the reader to see through Lily’s eyes. This book sometimes quakes with emotion, and I definitely felt Lily’s reality. Since I am all about the “feels,” this completely worked for me. I also enjoyed the way music and emotion were often tied together. The plot was not tied up neatly at the end, and I think that was a great choice. That is not what life is like. This is a beautiful, musical, emotive novel that fans of literary fiction and historical fiction will love.

My rating is 4.5 stars, rounded up to 5 on sites with no partial star option.

I received a free copy of this book. My review is voluntary and the opinions expressed are my own.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

(Marcia Peck in her own words) (excerpt from Amazon bio)

They say all first novels are part memoir, and indeed I did grow up in Belleville, New Jersey, my family did spend our summers on Cape Cod, and I had a marvelous cello teacher who very much resembled Alphius Metcalf. It took me a long time to write WATER MUSIC; in some ways, my whole life.

Growing up, I was a cat person. But I’ve learned to love dogs—even the naughty ones, maybe especially the naughty ones.

All in all, I look for the rhythms and sounds of music echoed in language and aspire to transpose some of that into my writing.

BUY LINKS

Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Apple Books | Google | Kobo

BEFORE YOU GO

*If you read the book, please leave reviews on Amazon and Goodreads, as well as anywhere else you review books.  Some people feel very daunted by writing a review. Don’t worry. You do not have to write a masterpiece. Just a couple of lines about how the book made you feel will make the author’s day and help the book succeed. The more reviews a book has, the more Amazon will promote it.

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