If your family is on the dysfunctional side, take heart! The Rockwells will make you feel like you grew up in a 60's sitcom. Eccentric Augusta Rockwell raised her daughters, Esme, Liv, and Ru, in her ancestral home on Asbury Avenue in Ocean City, New Jersey during the 1980's. All she has told her daughters (presumably facetiously) about their absent father is that he was a spy. The rest was left up to their imaginations until the grown sisters return to their childhood home on Asbury Avenue after Hurricane Sandy.
Oldest daughter Esme married Doug Toomey and eventually they had a daughter, Atty (Atticus), who is a bullied teenager. Doug, a teacher, was on a class field trip to Paris when Esme received the news (via a school official) that he had left her for his dentist. Esme had mostly married Doug because he seemed safe after the mysterious disappearance of her college love, Darwin Webber.
Liv has suffered a breakdown after the demise of her third marriage. Liv is a cherry-picker, targeting rich men in the New York Times engagement page and marrying them, but over the course of the years this strategy has proven less than successful as a means to finding lasting love and Liv has turned increasingly to medication to help herself cope, eventually landing in an expensive rehab facility. As a girl Liv had fallen in love with a young man named Teddy Whistler and their story seems suspiciously like the plot of younger sister's Ru's best-selling novel, Trust Teddy Wilmer. When Liv sees Ru's surprise engagement announcement in the Times, her first thought is that her sister's fiance, Cliff, is a perfect cherry-picking target.
Meanwhile, baby sister Ru (short for Ruby) is in Vietnam, living in a tent with a large local family in order to avoid (1) acknowledging her recent engagement and (2) writing the second novel that the world eagerly awaits.
As for Augusta, Hurricane Sandy has reminded her that life is short, so she begins to wonder about whether it's time to tell the girls the truth about their father and perhaps bring some closure to her own love story. Thus begins an entertaining journey through the lives of the Rockwells, a family badly in need of therapy. Will family secrets finally revealed destroy the family or create new connections? Read it and find out!
No comments:
Post a Comment