This book relies on the love of family and of revelations and transformations to do its work. The story has so much going for it along those lines that it jerks the inevitable tears, mostly in an earned way, and it has as its distinction that at the heart of the story lies a gay couple, two men who were married to women and who have children from the marriages. This has always been a problematic issue for me, gay men who used unknowing wives as the doors to their closet, but it is a fact of the world and the book treats the issue with passion. The families of the two men are artfully if clunkily brought into collision in a very small beach house in Maine, with the aging parents of one of the couple as near neighbors. The compression of the house drives the story thereafter. There is much to admire here but also much to question. The plot is loaded like a Lifetime movie; we have a drinking problem, an eating disorder, a rape victim, a narcissist, a neurodiverse child, a middle-aged woman in a midlife crisis, a woman roaming the neighborhood with dementia, a father with dementia, an unforgiving mother; this is not a comprehensive list by any means, but it gives the idea. The book is loaded for melodrama and delivers. There’s nothing wrong with any of that except that it’s a bit too much. The sentences themselves are well done, but the construction of the book is a problem for me. The writer chooses to focus on nearly all the family members in terms of point of view, not in an orderly way but head-hopping in most of the scenes. The writing is constantly explaining. The daughter who feels abandoned by her gay father plays this out in every scene as if we might have forgotten her trope since the last time we were in her head. Most characters display their particular bit of drama over and over again in the same way. It becomes a slog to read. Then, at the end, nearly all the characters reach a point of change at the same time, even some of the ones who have been offstage for most of the book. Nevertheless the book is affecting and worth reading and I’m glad to have spent time in it. This is actually pretty remarkable given the fact that the book does so many things I don’t like.