I felt for her, sure, but I was unable to reach over that wall that exists between reader and character and really understand her. The first was my inability to connect to Nora. While I loved the setting and enjoyed the story, there were two aspects that kept me from truly loving the book. While the book isn’t a mystery novel, there are enough unanswered questions to keep you guessing all along. There’s the mystery of Nora’s mother’s disappearance, the story of Maire (the aunt they are living with), the family aspects, the mystery of Owen, etc.
There’s also a beautiful mix of styles the book isn’t straight romance, and in fact I would say it mostly isn’t about the romance. Burke’s Island is rich in history, and I found the numerous characters to be all equally intriguing as Nora, Ella and Annie (Nora’s daughters) meet them, I wanted to know more about them and their life on the island. It has a soft, quiet quality to it and from the start gives you a hint of magical realism. The Cottage at Glass Beach was a very pleasant read. Is he, as her aunt’s friend Polly suggests, a selkie–a mythical being of island legend–summoned by her heartbreak, or simply someone who, like Nora, is trying to find his way in the wake of his own personal struggles?
Days later she finds an enigmatic fisherman named Owen Kavanagh shipwrecked on the rocks nearby. One night while sitting alone on Glass Beach below the cottage where she spent her childhood, Nora succumbs to grief, her tears flowing into the ocean. Nora spent her first five years on the island but has not been back to the remote community for decades–not since that long ago summer when her mother disappeared at sea. Settled by Irish immigrants, the island is a place where superstition and magic are carried on the ocean winds, and wishes and dreams wash ashore with the changing tides. Humiliated and hounded by the press, Nora packs up her daughters and takes refuge on Burke’s Island, off the coast of Maine. But her carefully constructed life falls to pieces when she, along with the rest of the world, learns of the infidelity of her husband, Malcolm. Married to the youngest attorney general in Massachusetts state history, Nora Cunningham is a picture-perfect political wife and a doting mother.
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