*Dnf
This book just wasn't for me. I found it very slow, and I just couldn't get into it. ( )

A beautifully written contemporary novel. A memorable read about family and forbidden love.

On a perfect August morning, Elle Bishop heads out for a swim in the pond below 'The Paper Palace' - her family's holiday home in Cape Cod. As she dives beneath the water, she relives the passionate encounter she had the night before, against the side of the house that knows all her darkest secrets, while her husband and mother chatted to their guests inside...
So begins a story that unfolds over twenty-four hours and fifty years, as Elle's shocking betrayal leads her to a life-changing decision.

I really enjoyed this novel as its well written and descriptive. A character driven story with a beautiful sense of time and place. I especially loved the ending. I will refrain from going into detail as this is one that needs to be read and discussed. I feel I should warn readers that the story does contain descriptions of rape and incest that may make for uncomfortable reading for some readers.

I do think this would make a terrific book club discussion read as plenty to discuss here. ( )

Other than some shock factor moments/descriptions (that I don’t mind as long as used in moderation, but maybe a few too many in the first quarter of the novel), I enjoyed this story. It kept me intrigued. I had love and hatred for characters which means they were developed nicely! Overall a good read. ( )

I really liked this book. I liked the way the present covers a single day, hour by hour, while the backstories are told more traditionally. I thought the modern-day relationships were very well portrayed...this book felt very real to me.

This a story about family relationships and the effects of trauma. It is complex, like life. Sometimes love isn't enough. Choices are usually far less clear than right or wrong. Or they are both. Lots to think about. ( )

“High above the tallest dune, a star appears in the sky, faint at first, then gaining strength until it becomes a brilliant jewel. And yet I know it is death I am seeing. The flickering out. The silent gasp. The sputtering beauty. A desperate flame—massive, transcendent—fighting for its last breath” (294).

This is a story about characters that are like dazzling, dying stars—beautiful and tragic and impossible not to watch their bright deaths streak across an obsidian sky. This is a story about star-crossed lovers. Like Catherine and Heathcliff, Elle and Jonas’s souls are made of the same: hummingbird feathers and underwater kisses and pine-needle-carpeted forest floors. With a shared history—filled with innocence and connection and shame and guilt and secrets—they are woven together, different ends from the same skein, threaded and knotted together despite difficult life choices that keep them apart.

Told in four parts, in dual timelines—past and today—Eleanor’s story unravels from multicolored yarn, each thread revealing how she gets to be a fifty-year-old happily married woman with three children who must deal with outcomes of a one-night affair she’s just had with Jonas, the love of her life. Through the untangling of her story, we watch pieces come together, secrets and revelations buried deep beneath the sand dunes of the Cape and the sewers of the city asphalt, things too dirty and tainted and rotted, tugged out from the shadows and unmasked enough for Elle to make a final impossible choice: “One [she] can’t have. One [she doesn’t] deserve to have” (355).

Page-turner isn’t the right term. This story is more than that. This is a story you get caught in, wrapped up tightly in—sometimes it feels like a warm blanket, others like the eye of a storm. Regardless, it’s a story so immersive, so emotive that these characters will stay with you long after you’ve turned the last page.
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