Skip to main content

Book Review: At the Water's Edge by Sara Gruen


After making utter fools of themselves during a New Year's Eve party that ushered in the year 1942, Maddie and her husband Ellis are cut off by her in-laws. Her father-in-law, a former army Colonel, is already disappointed in Ellis because he got out of fighting in the war due to being color blind, and her mother-in-law despises Maddie. Left with nothing, Ellis convinces Maddie and their friend Hank to help him on an adventure to prove himself to his father.

At the Water's Edge by Sara Gruen takes us on this adventure to Scotland in search of the Loch Ness Monster. The three travel across the ocean through the middle of the war and land in Scotland, weary and out of their element. Staying in a small inn in a small town, the men expect to be pampered as they always have, but Maddie begins to make connections with the people who work in the inn.

I enjoyed this unusual story, particularly because of the characters. Each is a complex individual with positive and negative traits, although for some these weren't quite as balanced as others. I especially liked the women of the inn, Meg and Anna. Maddie spends a lot of time reflecting on her situation and her marriage as the men go off to hunt the monster. There's a bit of mystery around not only the monster but also the different characters.

While this is historical fiction, and there is a war going on, it's more of a story of one woman's journey to find meaning in her life. It's a bit slow at times, and a bit over the top at other times. But overall, it is a unique story with interesting characters and a bit of a mystery to unravel.

My Rating: 3.5/5

Read an excerpt from At the Water's Edge
Visit the author's website

This review was written based on a copy of At the Water's Edge that I received from Random House through NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. This post includes Amazon Affiliate links. If you click on one of these links and make a purchase, I will receive a very small commission and your price remains the same.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Thanks for stopping by! I'd love to hear your thoughts!

Popular posts from this blog

Getting back to blogging

It seems that blogging has dropped to the bottom of my list for the past year, and was pretty low for the year or two prior to that. I love to read, and am continuing to do so, but as my regular readers know I haven't been around much. My last blog post was almost a year ago!!

There are many things that have taken me away from blogging. Work has been much more challenging and interesting these past few years, but that means I really don't want to get back on the computer when I get home at night - or on the weekends.

Family life has been more busy with kids having multiple activities in the evenings, leaving little time to just hang out and write about the books that I read.

I will admit to a bit of a Facebook addiction, which means way too much time spent scrolling through my newsfeed instead of doing something more productive. This is one of the things I'm working on and hoping that this will free up some time for getting back to the blog.

Overall, life is good. Work is …
Post a Comment
Read more

Banned Books Week: Junie B. Jones by Barbara Park

This is the end of Banned Books Week and unfortunately, I haven't had a lot of time to write about banned books this year. But I did want to include at least one post about it, so today I wanted to share one of the book series that it seems most people are surprised to find on the list: Junie B. Jones by Barbara Park.

According to Wikipedia:
The Junie B. Jones series came in at #71 on the American Library Association's list of the Top 100 Banned or Challenged Books from 2000-2009. Reasons cited are poor social values taught by the books and Junie B. Jones not being considered a good role model due to her mouthiness and bad spelling/grammar. This is an interesting example of a banned book. Many times there are serious, controversial topics featured in books that are challenged. Things like homosexuality, drugs, vulgar language, etc. You can actually understand why people may not want their children to read those books, and why they may challenge their inclusion in school libra…
10 comments
Read more

April Reading Review

Where exactly did April go? I swear it was just the middle of March and now it's May. Once again, I'm going to provide a quick review of each of the books I read last month. For the last two weeks of the month, I participated in the Spring Into Horror Readathon hosted by Michelle at Seasons of Reading. The only rule was that you had to read at least one book that was horror, thriller, etc. I read one book that qualified. With the exception of the first book in my list, the books I mention below were read during the readathon


My book club's May selection was Just Mercy by Bryan Stevenson. I had started reading this nonfiction book about the author's work representing men, women and children who were on death row in March but finished the book in April. This is an eye-opening story that everyone at my book club discussion agreed should be required reading for law schools and police officers and even legislators who are making the laws related to judgements. I learned to…
3 comments
Read more