Salt Air, Secrets, and Summerland Cove

This story will leave you breathless—and not just because its characters are running all over Maine searching for David Kauffman. Summerland Cove tackles mental illness and the exhaustion of constantly holding the center together—especially when things start to fall apart, but this is what the Kauffman family does—they’ll stop at nothing to bring him home safe. At its heart, it’s a story about love, marriage, mental resilience, and the strain that keeping secrets puts on a family.

So much of the drama flows through Innisfree, the summer cottage in Summerland Cove that’s been in Greta’s family for at least a century. Greta’s mother named it after William Butler Yeats’s poem The Lake Isle of Innisfree, and it could not have been more fitting.

In the poem, Yeats longs to build a cabin on this lake isle, where he can live in peace and harmony with nature, at ease, by himself. He feels the rush of being there even as he’s in the harsh reality of the city with its hard, paved streets. That feeling? That security and sense of solace is what the Kauffmans feel about Innisfree. So, when its very existence as the family’s beloved refuge is threatened, David literally goes to the edge of the world to see that it stays in the family. Told from the women’s perspective, Summerland Cove is a testament to the resiliency one must have to keep their shit together under the worst of circumstances. In this case, the threat of losing Innisfree and David in one fell swoop.

Yeats’s poem embodies the mindset of the much-loved husband, father, and brother David Kauffman. And when he fails to arrive at Summerland Cove for his fiftieth birthday party, his wife, Lindy, and daughter Hailey lead the search that retraces his steps from their home in Rhode Island all the way to the northeasternmost reaches of the continental United States. It’s a true odyssey, especially since, out in Maine’s wilderness, cell service is spotty at best.

Ellen Baker is a lyrical writer. Her depiction of Maine’s natural beauty is stunning. You smell the salty air coming off the tidal breeze. The morning sun warms your skin as it edges up from the horizon. When she writes about David’s anxiety, his emotional state during his youth, when his father wants him to give up their summer cottage to work for him at the machine shop, it’s visceral. She gets the nuance of mental health as the story moves between past and present. Baker gives us a front-row seat to the family’s secrets. Secrets David tries to work through alone—and the stress is immeasurable. Baker shows us his struggles, and we want him to be safe, we want him to survive.

What stayed with me, long after I read the last page, is the three perspectives we get from grandmother (Greta) to daughter (Lindy) to granddaughter (Hailey). Slowly unraveling their own secrets, past and present, the women reveal a larger web of deceit and heartbreak that might cause anyone to miss their own birthday party.

Summerland Cove is the kind of book that lingers — like the smell of salt air, or a beloved place you can’t quite leave behind.

This review is made possible by NetGalley and Mariner Books.