The Book of Summer

Gable (A Paris Apartment) bases her new story on a real-life situation: erosion on Nantucket Island in Massachusetts. Cissy Codman is desperate to save Cliff House, which has been a family home for a century. She insists she will move out of once all of her legal channels are exhausted, but her husband dispatches their daughter, Bess, to make sure Cissy packs boxes and does indeed vacate the dangling-by-a-thread residence. As Cissy packs (and resists packing), there are more "big picture" twists and turns. Woven throughout are guest book entries and stories from relatives that open Bess's eyes to the history and secrets of her family. While the plot offers some surprises, the jokes sometimes fall flat, and the characters are not always relatable. The fonts used to represent different guest book entries make them hard to decipher and are distracting.