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Sea Escape by Lynne Griffin is the story of a mother and daughter set around a beautiful beach home, Sea Escape, on the New England coastline.

Laura, a devoted wife, mother and nurse has always been trying to get her mother’s attention.  But Helen, her estranged mother, seems uninterested in anything to do with her daughter.  Instead, she spends all day reminiscing and reading old love letters that her deceased husband wrote while serving in the Korean War and later as a war correspondent during the Vietnam War.

Helen seems only interested in the past and not what’s right in front of her nor the future.  When Helen suffers a debilitating stroke, Laura believes that she can not only make her mother happy again but also close the gap that has grown between them through the years.  Laura has never been privy to her father’s letters but with her mother unable to speak, Laura dives deep into the letters hoping that she’ll finally understand her mother.  In doing so, she discovers buried family secrets and that her own buried secret is shocking similar to that of her own mother.

The story alternates between the present with Laura haggardly trying to maintain a sense of normalcy with her two young children while spending each day at the hospital taking care of with her ailing mother and in the past with Helen’s love story to Joseph, their marriage, and attempts at creating a family despite his constant overseas absences.  I do enjoy books with alternate storytelling and time lines – giving us bits and pieces, slowly revealing key plot points and character insight.

Laura’s husband, Christian is a landscape designer and I loved the references to his beautiful gardens.  Sea Escape, Helen’s home on the beach, felt very real to me.  The book has a very strong sense of place and I appreciate that.  Time as well.  Helen’s role as a mother and housewife in the fifties is strikingly different from that of Laura’s.  It’s easy to see why they so often misunderstood each other.

Ultimately, the novel didn’t live up to it’s potential.  I was bogged down with my disbelief of Helen’s and Laura’s relationship.  As this relationship is the entire basis of the book, everything else just fell for me.

Laura keeps telling herself over and over how much she loves her mother and she desperately wants to make her happy, but nothing is given to show me why she should love her mother.  While her father was alive, her mother only seemed to live for his infrequent coming homes and after he died, Helen pretty much ignores Laura for the rest of her childhood.  Although Laura is the child that Helen took years to conceive, I needed at least one moment of a good solid connection between the two to understand why it was that Laura could continue to give so much when she received so little in return.

As Laura reads her father’s letters she comes to know that both her mother and her father have kept family secrets hidden away from her.  We know that Laura has a secret of her own as well, that she wants to tell her mother before it’s too late.  Because Laura didn’t feel an immediacy to uncover these secrets, reveal her own secrets,  nor read all of her father’s letters, the book didn’t feel very tight.

Truths were revealed without the packing punch that I would expect to accompany them.  Everything was set up really well, and I imagine a second reading would show how carefully crafted Griffin’s story really is, but it lacked the emotional aspect that I would think a book like this would give.  I needed to be shown rather than told how characters felt.  I didn’t believe in the mother-daughter reconciliation (nor that of her brother’s as well) nor the emotions that they were feeling.

For example, one line from Laura: “After years of longing for her presence full and whole, I’d found her laugh, her touch, and her love.  They were hidden behind my lie.”  What laugh, what touch, what love?  I still felt as though this hadn’t quite happened yet.  Plus, I don’t think they were hidden behind Laura’s lie.  Helen emotionally abandoned Laura as a small child, years before Laura’s lie would present itself at age 17.  It wasn’t Laura’s fault, it was Helen’s fault.  Not believing how the characters felt, made it difficult to empathize with them.

I enjoyed the plot line, sense of time and place, the alternate storytelling, and the struggle to attend to an ailing family member but the characters fell flat for me.  Not a perfect read.  It was simply okay when I was hoping for fantastic. Readers who enjoy women’s fiction on the exploration of mothers and daughters may very well give this one a try. Perhaps you’ll feel differently than I.

Links of interest: Lynne Griffin website, Facebook and on Twitter. Visit TLC Book Tours for additional stops on the Sea Escape blog tour.
Genre: Fiction
Publisher: Simon and Schuster. July 6, 2010
Hardcover, 304 pages. ISBN 1439180601
Sea Escape is available from your favorite independent bookstore, Powell’s, and Amazon.

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