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Returning To Shore (2014)

by Corinne Demas(Favorite Author)

3.48 of 5 Votes: 3

ISBN

1467713287 (ISBN13: 9781467713283)

languge

English

genre

Young Adult Fiction

publisher

Carolrhoda Books

review 1: I saw this book recommended as an example of young-adult fiction that also works for adults, and it is. This is a small but lovely, quiet story. The main character's a 16-year-old girl sent off for time with her father, whom she hasn't seen since she was three and has no memory of, while her mother's off on her third honeymoon. Clare peels back the layers of mystery around her father's life with her mother and his disengagement, sometimes intentionally, sometimes not. It would have been easy to set up some standard pokes at Clare's mother's very much upper-class life against her father's much poorer life studying sea turtles in Cape Cod Bay, but the father's compassion undermines a lot of snap judgments. There's a secret at the heart of it all which unfolds gently, and wit... moreh a bunch of the messiness that so often characterizes real life. Knowing makes some things easier, others harder, and Demas does a great job with Clare's profoundly conflicted emotions, at her father, and at the surrounding world while she's trying to make sense of things.Since it's tagged as LGBT fiction, the broad strokes of her father's secret will come as no surprise, but this is nonetheless a book very rich in discoveries. I'm glad I read it, and will be looking for more from Demas.
review 2: I received an advanced reader copy of this novel from the publisher. Demas has published a wide range of novels - from adult literary to children's picture books. I have read one of her previous novels, The Writer's Circle, but this is the first of her YA novels that I've read.In Corinne Demas's new novel, Returning to Shore (2014), fifteen-year-old Clare is sent to Blackfish Island for the summer when her mother remarries. She stays with her father, a man she has not seen since she was three and only speaks to once a year. While she wants to make the most of her exile and reconnect with her father, he seems more interested in protecting terrapin turtles - an endangered species that inhabits the island. However, as the summer wears on, Clare discovers there is more to the island - and her father - than she first thought.After the first couple of chapters, I was sure I had this novel pegged: a teenage girl reconnects with her long lost father over a summer at his beach house while also finding true love. I couldn't have been more wrong as there wasn't a cliché in sight in this mainstream YA novel. Clare and her father, Richard, are the main characters. The central drama revolves around Clare as she tries to discover what kind of person her father is, an oddball recluse who she barely knows. Though he has supported her financially her whole childhood, he has never wanted to be more than a shadow in her life and she feels abandoned by him. However, as Clare discovers, he had reasons for keeping distant. Through the intensity of her observations and thoughts, the reader sees - and feels - what Clare does as she learns about her father and herself.Clare is the heart of this brief novel and she carries the weight with ease. I was impressed by the complexity and authenticity of her interiority. Her thoughts felt organic, not just showing the reader how she feels but adding backstory and developing her character in a deeply interesting way. Here's a passage of when Clare first meets her father:"What did she know about him? Very little. On her birthdays he sent her cards that said, 'Now you are _' for whatever age she was, and inside he'd Scotch-tape some money. When she was younger it was a ten-dollar bill, later a twenty. Last year it had been a fifty. He taped it carefully so that most of the tape was on the card, and only a little of it on the money, and so she could peel it away easily. She looked at his hands on the steering wheel now. His fingers were callused, the nails cracked. It was hard to imagine those rough hands selecting a birthday card, taping the money inside it."Eventually, Clare becomes aware that her father is hiding something - something she may not want to know. She evades the subtext, rationalizing this way:"If you didn't want to know things, you didn't have to know them. Things didn't become facts until someone actually spoke them. Until then, you could just go on acting just the way you have been acting and even if you suspected there was something that would change everything, you didn't have to acknowledge it; you didn't have to let it in." Ignorance is bliss. Or at least it can be for a while. However, Clare discovers - as most of us do - that we can't keep fooling ourselves. I found her grappling with these heavy topics intriguing and convincing.This book is meditative with a beautifully written protagonist. I would highly recommend to adult readers of YA fiction as well as teens bored with predictable vampire novels. I hope to see this novel make its way on to school reading lists this summer. Returning to Shore is a quiet novel with a lot to say. less

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