Imprint Friday: The Silver Boat by Luanne Rice

Welcome to Imprint Friday and today's featured imprint: Pamela Dorman Books. Stop by each week to be introduced to a must-read title from one of my favorite imprints. I know you'll be adding many of these books to your wish list.

Luanne Rice has written more than two dozen novels and her latest, The Silver Boat, has a lot of elements I like: family, memories, a summer getaway, and Martha's Vineyard are just some of them. Here's the publisher's summary:

. . . [A] heartwarming yet heart-wrenching portrait of three far-flung sisters who come home to Martha's Vineyard one last time. Their mother's beach house is the only place any of them ever found true happiness and they need to begin the difficult process of letting go. Memories of their grandmother, mother, and their Irish father, who sailed away the year Dar turned twelve, rise up and expose the fine cracks in their family myth-especially when a cache of old letters reveals enough truth to send them back to their ancestral homeland.

Transplanted into the unfamiliar, each sister sees life, her heart, and her relationship to home in a new way. But how do they let go of a place that contains the complicated love of their imperfect family? Without the house, where will they be together?

The novel is a season on Martha's Vineyard; a mission to Ireland; a cast of friends . . . and three very different sisters with lives filled with beauty, sorrow, and deep love they'd never been quite sure they could trust. The Silver Boat is Luanne Rice at her very best, complete with her singular talent for capturing a family in all its flawed complexity.

So what do I love about this book? Primarily, as I mentioned, it's the sisters' relationship and how their joint strength can help them with both their shared grief and individual troubles. I love that the women are flawed in ways that many of us can relate to and that their troubles are in based ordinary life.

I also can't help but be taken with the food descriptions. From grilled cheese and tomato soup lunches to dinners of grilled swordfish with sauteed broccoli rabe and garlic, the bond of shared meals and the warmth of a friendly kitchen capture the soul of a family. Rice absolutely shines when she writes these details.

There is so much more to The Silver Boat, and in the following video, Rice tells you about it in her own words. (The video is spoiler free.)

To learn about Luanne Rice and her work, be sure to visit her website, where you can also see more videos pertaining to The Silver Boat. For additional insight, see her Out of Twenty interview with Nicole of Linus's Blanket. The Penguin USA website includes a reading guide as well as other materials for book clubs.

Pamela Dorman Books is a featured imprint on Beth Fish Reads. For more information about the imprint, please read Pamela Dorman's introductory letter, posted here on December 3, 2010.

The Silver Boat at an Indie

The Silver Boat at Powell's

The Silver Boat at Book Depository
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Published by Viking / Pamela Dorman Books, April 2011
ISBN-13: 9780670022502