Waiting on Wednesday: The Guest Book

Waiting on Wednesday is a weekly feature where I highlight a soon to be released title I can't wait to read.

This week's pick: The Guest Book by Sarah Blake
Due out: May 7, 2019

Synopsis taken from Amazon:

History lies in the cracks between…

No. A simple word uttered on a summer porch in 1936 will haunt Kitty Milton for the rest of her life. Kitty and her husband Ogden both come from families used to running the country, believing themselves in the right, their lineage and their power hanging lightly on their shoulders. But it is this refusal that will come to be Kitty’s defining moment, a moment she can never take back, and which will ripple through the Milton family for generations. For while they summer on their island in Maine, the winds of change are beginning to stir overseas, change they refuse to see, anchored as they are to the way things have always been.

The way things have always been is exactly what Kitty and Ogden’s children, the generation of the 50s, want to blow free of. In New York City, Joan has a job, and Moss wants to write songs for what feels like new times. And when Len Levy, a Jewish upstart at Ogden’s banking firm, and his best friend, Reg Pauling, a black man who went to Harvard with Moss, enter the Miltons’ circle, the binding threads to family and to its sense of place, tighten. Moss insists the times are changing. And indeed everything does change.

So much so that in the present day, the third generation of Miltons doesn’t have enough money to keep the island in Maine. Evie Milton’s mother has just died, and now she is told she and her cousins must sell the island that has defined their family for nearly a century. But in excavating her mother and grandparents’ history, Evie must contend with the fact that some stories are not ours to know and that the very foundation of the Milton family might be resting on air.

The Guest Book asks how we remember and what we choose to forget. It examines the secrets we inherit and pass on unknowingly, repeating the mistakes of our parents and grandparents. Sarah Blake’s triumphant novel tells the story of a family and a country that buries its past in quiet, until the present calls forth a reckoning.