The women who spent their childhood summers in a small southern town discover it harbors secrets as lush as the marshes that surround it… 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 … 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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I really enjoyed the writing style, the tone/mood the author created, and the way the story elements all tied together. A gentle, satisfying read.
Give me a book with a beach house and I’m happily entertained! Add a bookshop, and I’m even more enamored! This is a story about three close friends who meet at a beach house their parents retreat to annually. Then one night, one of the mothers disappears. It’s years before the friends reunite, but eventually, they reunite at the beach house, where each of their stories unravel. There’s the doctor who is waiting to hear the results of a tragic mistake she may have made in the emergency room. She’s there with her daughter who loves to escape to the local bookshop where she befriends the owner. Then, there’s the artist and her brother, whose mother had disappeared. I thoroughly enjoyed all their stories, people with believable issues due to their circumstances and life experiences. We see how the therapeutic environment of Watersend, South Carolina does wonders for troubled souls. Bonus: we discover what happened to the disappearing mother.
Every line in The Bookshop at Water’s End is soulfully written in seamlessly crafted chapters. Beginning in the emergency room of a Charleston, South Carolina hospital, this enchanting story never loses its page-turning sense of urgency, and yet it is delivered softly, as a deeply insightful, thought provoking character study on two women, whose lives are significantly entwined. Author Patti Callahan Henry knows her way around the nuances of women, and writes with uncommon fearlessness, as she tells the story of Bonny and Lainey, in their mid-forties now, who formed a life-long friendship at the age of thirteen while on family vacation in the small South Carolina coastal town of Watersend. Then and there, the wheels were set in motion of a dynamic that resonated forward with such resounding effect that even they were not aware of its repercussions. But there is no running from cause and effect, and when Bonny and Lainey have cause to return to Watersend, the threads of this story reverberate in love and longing, mystery and self-discovery, all woven together in one plausible tapestry.
Bonny Blankenship’s life and identity is centered upon her medical profession, whose seeds were planted at thirteen by uttering a fateful wish in one magical, belief-driven moment alongside Lainey, as the two swam in the river at Watersend. That her wish came true sets the foundation for Bonny’s side of the story, just as Lainey’s simultaneous wish materializes, in what is ultimately an outgrowth from her anguished childhood. Lainey is an acclaimed artist, whose medium involves creating visual stories by piecing them together, an act, the reader suspects, that has much to do with piecing together the unresolved mystery around the disappearance of her mother. It is this singular, cataclysmic event that shapes the future for Lainey and her older brother, Owen, whom Bonnie secretly loves. It is the fear of friendship’s betrayal and Owen’s mercurial nature that keeps Bonny’s love for Owen in arrested development. It is the longing of the heart and the reasoning of the mind that burdens her with the push and pull of love’s unrealized potential, even as her life path finds her married to another and raising a daughter named Piper.
The character, Piper Blankenship, seems to me the conscience of this story. She is nineteen, maladjusted, and written with such accurate sensitivity that I repeatedly pictured her at the heart of a great YA story. Her perspective gifts the reader with a view from the edge, and her pivotal placement in the story shows us unflinchingly who each of the adult characters are, as they try to find their footing amidst shifting tides.
The Bookshop at Water’s End is a story that never stops searching, and that many of its events are tied to Watersend’s local bookshop is brilliantly symbolic. The bookshop is an anchor in full possession of the past’s facts, and its proprietress, Mimi, plays her cards close to the vest as she faithfully waits for the players in this story to discover the clues that will allow the looming puzzle affecting them all to fall into proper place.
Three cheers for author Patti Callahan Henry. She has given us a heart-wrenching, mesmerizing story of characters beautifully flawed and made them beautifully human.
A very easy quick read.
The Bookshop at Water’s End is my first Patti Callahan Henry book, and it will not be my last. This was an enjoyable weekend read. It is well written with well-developed and interesting characters. There are some twists and heartbreaking turns for the characters that you don’t expect. I highly recommend this book if you enjoy women’s fiction and great storytelling.
Loved this book. Good story about generations of one family and relationships
This book is more than a story of two childhood friends known as the “Summer Sisters” it is a story of searching for what was lost years ago in the summer home located at the water’s edge in the town of Watersend. Bonny and Lainey spent a few summers in this town until a tragedy happened and they never returned. Bonny begs her “Summer Sister” to return to the summer house after she has a devastating event in her life. The two return to the summer house of childhood along with their children and slowly pick up the pieces of their lives both past and present. Bonny and Lainey including their children bring together what it means to have good relationships and also a great friendship. In the end, you will ask the question of yourself much like Bonny did, “what do you want to be your one good thing?”
Two friends come back together at the seaside retreat to relive and reminisce their youth. But both are in crisis, one from a missing mother that just up and left one day and has not been seen since. The other may have killed a patient in the er during a time of chaos.
Lainey is an artist, a mom, a wife and still looks for her mother everywhere. Bonny is a married at doc that has been in love since her youth with Lainey’s older brother, Owen. Bobby is haunted by the patient she may have given the wrong meds to as he told her he couldn’t die yet “as he had one more thing..”
The novel moves everyone to the home on the beach they shared years ago. Memories, lost causes, love, what makes a home and about doing the best you can at that one time. Forgiveness. Parents. Stories we makeup about ourselves, our friends, even strangers and how we believe them. Make some lemonade, sit in a comfy chair, outside in a breeze, read this book and inhale.
I love this book as well as all the other books Patti has written!