After The Storm
Debbie Macomber has based Cottage
By The Sea, on a real incident in 2014, when a landslide in near Oso,
Washington, took with it forty-nine homes and killed all the residents.
In the book, Annie Marlow, who drops out of going home for Thanksgiving
to hang out with her friends in California, finds the next day that her entire
family has been wiped out. How does anyone cope with a tragedy of this
magnitude? Annie has a loving aunt and a cousin Gabby to help her, but the
depth of her grief is too much to bear.
She decides to go to the happy place she remembers as a child, the pretty
beach town of Oceanside, where the family used to spend vacations. By a stroke
of fortune she gets a job as a physician’s assistant in the local clinic and
with the intervention of a man called Keaton, manages to rent the very cottage
of her memories.
Keaton was abused as a child and has grown up to be a silent, taciturn
man, who is more of a misfit because of his size—he is huge! His only friend
are school mate Preston, and the severely agoraphobic Mellie, who is the owner
of the cottage Annie rents. She does not remember him, but Keaton had seen her
as a teenager and fallen in love with her. He becomes her main pillar of
support as she tries to put the tragedy behind her and build her life afresh.
Macomber has written it in a simple, no-frills style—the little joys and
sorrows of a small town, where Annie tries to belong. There are speed bumps in
her tender relationship with Keaton and the stormy friendship with Mellie, but
it all works out in the story that is basically a modern-day fairytale romance. A good
holiday read.
Cottage By The Sea
By Debbie Macomber
Publisher: Ballantine
Pages: 352
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