‘We should be fighting the sea, not each other. We should be thinking of our families. Dead’s dead; but everything returns. If you let it.’ [p. 191]
After her mother's death in Paris, artist Mado Prasteau returns to Le Devin, the tiny island where she grew up and where her taciturn father -- known as GrosJean -- still lives. Mado has a love-hate relationship with her father, who has never answered any of her letters: she also has a love-hate relationship with her childhood home, the hamlet of Les Salants. It's only a few miles from the much more prosperous La Houssinière, where her sister's husband's uncle M. Brismand grows wealthy on the income from tourists and from the retirement home he'd like GrosJean to move into. Mado's sister Adrienne (mostly absent) agrees. But Mado doesn't want her father to be thus diminished -- and, together with mysterious drifter Flynn (who's living in an abandoned WW2 blockhouse) she hatches a scheme to restore Les Salants to its former prosperity.
I think I prefer Harris' psychological dramas (blueeyedboy, Broken Light and so on) and her Loki books (especially Runemarks) to the early, cosier novels such as Coastliners and Chocolat: but this was a pleasant beach-read for my first beach trip this year, and I liked the ways in which Mado's relationships shifted and changed over the course of the novel.
There's perhaps a touch of magic -- or magic realism -- to the setting, but there are also intrusions from the modern world and the mainland. Le Devin is a kind of pastoral backwater, almost like travelling into the past: it doesn't necessarily reflect contemporary French life, but the ageing population, the superstition and the cantankerously close-knit community felt familiar. Coastliners was published in 2002, which probably adds to the hazy nostalgic sense of simpler times. (I know it's only 22 years! but the world felt very different then.)
Fulfils the ‘magic realism’ rubric of the 52 books in 2024 challenge.
Fulfils the ‘Centres a father-daughter relationship’ rubric of the Something Bookish Reading Challenge.
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