TUESDAY EXCERPTS: “THE BOOKSHOP AT WATER’S END”

Welcome to another Tuesday celebrating bookish events, First Chapter/Intros, hosted by Bibliophile by the Sea; and Teaser Tuesdays hosted by The Purple Booker.

Today’s feature is a NetGalley e-ARC from Patti Callahan Henry:  The Bookshop at Water’s End, a story about the women who spent their childhood summers in a small southern town and discover it harbors secrets as lush as the marshes that surround it…

 

Intro:  (Prologue – Mimi the Bookseller)

We are defined by the moods and whims of a wild tidal river surrounding our small town, cradling us in its curved basin.  We don’t shape it; it shapes us.  The gray-blue water brings us what it will and only when it desires.  One sweltering, languid afternoon as I shelved dusty paperbacks, I looked up to see a ghost.  The girl was the spitting image of a woman I knew years ago—too many summers ago to count.  It could have been another whim of the river.

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Teaser:  (Lainey McKay) Once Daisy had run off to find George and Piper, I tossed the letters back into the box.  I carried it all to the garage and then used my phone to video chat with Tim so he could see I was about to set up my studio (46%).

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Synopsis:  Bonny Blankenship’s most treasured memories are of idyllic summers spent in Watersend, South Carolina, with her best friend, Lainey McKay. Amid the sand dunes and oak trees draped with Spanish moss, they swam and wished for happy-ever-afters, then escaped to the local bookshop to read and whisper in the glorious cool silence. Until the night that changed everything, the night that Lainey’s mother disappeared.

Now, in her early fifties, Bonny is desperate to clear her head after a tragic mistake threatens her career as an emergency room doctor, and her marriage crumbles around her. With her troubled teenage daughter, Piper, in tow, she goes back to the beloved river house, where she is soon joined by Lainey and her two young children. During lazy summer days and magical nights, they reunite with bookshop owner Mimi, who is tangled with the past and its mysteries. As the three women cling to a fragile peace, buried secrets and long ago loves return like the tide.

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What do you think?  Would you keep reading?

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