Distant Shores: A Novel
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER - "Hannah examines whether love and commitment are enough to sustain a marriage when two people who have put their individual dreams on ice get a chance to defrost them . . . in fast-moving prose punctuated by snappy asides."--People Elizabeth and Jackson Shore married young, raised two daughters, and weathered the storms of youth as they built a family. From a distance, their lives look picture perfect. But after the girls leave home, Jack and Elizabeth quietly drift apart. When Jack accepts a wonderful new job, Elizabeth puts her own needs aside to follow him across the country. Then tragedy turns Elizabeth's world upside down. In the aftermath, she questions everything about her life--her choices, her marriage, even her long-forgotten dreams. In a daring move that shocks her husband, friends, and daughters, she lets go of the woman she has become--and reaches out for the woman she wants to be.
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Community Reviews
I already forget which book this is- I read it this summer- but anything Hannah writes is good. It was not one of my top favorites of hers, but still worth reading if you like her style. I think this was more of a beachy read than her more recent books.
“If there was one thing a Southern family knew how to keep, it was a secret…That’s what we women do, isn’t it? We push our lives underwater and float on the surface. Then one day you realize it’s someone else’s pool.” Jack and Elizabeth Shore’s “relationship had become a sea of undercurrents and riptides with no shallow, placid water to be found.” But life “was like this wave. Sometimes you had to dive into trouble to come out on the other side…The tallest mountains were created by violence and chaos; like them, a woman’s independence was born of fire.”
Confronted with a marriage in crisis, Elizabeth discovers that “Freedom had always been there for her, available every time she started the car. Available to any woman who dared to look up from the preplanned route and wonder, Where would that road take me?” Talent is “a gift. A starting place upon which whole lives can be built…It’s never easy to start a thing…that’s what separates the dreamers from the doers.” For years, she’d failed by omission, but “being good enough wasn’t the point anyway, trying was.”
“Time. It was the rack everything hung on: life, loss, hope, love. So often, it seemed to slip through your fingers like silk. But sometimes, you could reach back into what was and take hold…Some things, once lost, were worth dropping to your knees for. Even if your knees were made of glass and might shatter on impact.” As his wife comes into her own, Jack “understood his love for Elizabeth now. It wasn’t skin-deep emotion…It was in his bones and sinews; it was what had kept him standing straight and tall for all these years.” I love you: “Those were the ones that mattered most of all; everything else was frosting.”
Distant Shores is “a novel about a woman who has lost a piece of herself; she needs to take the time and have the courage to go in search of who she wants to be in the middle of her life.” “Let me be martini-honest here:” Distant Shores deserves ten stars.
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