From the description I did not realize this was going to be a collection of short stories. I'm not usually one to read that format of a book however since I had it I gave it a wholehearted effort. For me it came up flat. From the get go I found the delivery of the characters to be boring an did not hold my attention. Some of the stories were better than others but overall I was disappointed with this book.

TWO-CENT TUESDAY
Below are a few (somewhat) brief, $.02 opinions about books I've read or listened to recently but don't have the time, inclination, or opportunity to review in full. Their appearance in this recurring piece often has little to nothing to do with merit. Some I enjoyed as much or more than those that got the full court press. I hope you'll consider one or two for your own TBR stack if they strike your fancy whether they struck mine or not.

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UNDONE BY PANDEMIC BRAIN (MY ONGOING EXCUSE)

The Ocean House, by Mary-Beth Hughes


I'm something of a sucker for interconnected stories and this cover rocks. The publicity materials cite this as "an exquisite world of complicated family tales on the Jersey Shore," so I was all-in. Unfortunately, it lost me quickly. I'm not sure if it was me or the writing (though taking a quick peek at other ratings tells me it's not all me), but I did not connect with Hughes's prose at all. I love complicated family tales, so I would like to give this one another go, but I'm not burning to get to it.

The synopsis of this book really intrigued me so I was really excited to read this book. However, I found it really difficult to get into. Neither, the plot or the characters resonated with me.

Chapter after chapter, I found it quite difficult to follow. This just didn’t work for me.

Honestly not what I expected, A set of stories that did not totally connect for me. I was expecting a beach read, and I just could not connect.

I had such high hopes for this book. It takes place on The Jersey Shore where 3 generations are coming together. There is Faith, with her mother Irene and her daughter Cece. These are wounded people and I thought the stories would bring the characters back to each other or at least explain why things happened.

Instead, I struggled with this book. I found it hard to follow and just couldn’t connect or understand the characters. The book just didn’t come together for me. I think this author has talent and would like to try another of her books, but better connections are needed.

Thank you NetGalley, Mary-Beth Hughes, and Grove Atlantic for providing me a copy of this book. I really appreciate this.

I tried to finish this book but the short stories were too confusing to keep up with. The premise sounds good but this just fell flat for me.

The Ocean House by Mary Beth Hughes

The Ocean House explores the damaged lives of families from a beach town on the Jersey Shore.

This book was very confusing. The writing did not flow. It reminded me of a journal. Most of the characters were unfriendly. I did not enjoy this book.

Thank you Net Galley for sending me an advanced reader’s copy for my review.

EXCERPT: And maybe this is where the story begins. If the younger sister was the terrible middle, and the old poet, seen at long last through the eyes of love, was the end, then this, the poets began to believe - and it frightened them in its starkness - might be the start.

Who picked her stepmother up at the train station? They all did.

A huddle of poets, braced against the whipping wind off the icy river, sheltered only by each other's warmth. The train crept in to a stop. They already felt the escaped curl on the collar. The sexy wisp. As if the old poet had bequeathed them something delicious. Alive. Breathing.

ABOUT 'THE OCEAN HOUSE: STORIES': Faith, a mother of two young children, Cece and Connor, is in need of summer childcare. As a member of a staid old beach club in her town and a self-made business consultant, she is appalled when her brother-in-law sends her an unruly, ill-mannered teenager named Lee-Ann who appears more like a wayward child than competent help. What begins as a promising start to a redemptive relationship between the two ends in a tragedy that lands Faith in a treatment facility, leveled by trauma.

Years later, Faith and her mother, Irene, visit Cece in college. A fresh-faced student with a shaved head and new boyfriend, Cece has become a force of her own. Meanwhile, her grandmother, Irene, is in the early stages of dementia. She slips in and out of clarity, telling lucid tales of her own troubled youth. Faith dismisses her mother's stories as bids for attention. The three generations of women hover between wishful innocence and a more knowing resilience against the cruelty that hidden secrets of the past propel into the present.

MY THOUGHTS: I don't know quite what I was expecting, but I didn't get it. And when I say 'I didn't get it,' I really didn't get it.

I love interconnecting stories. I adore Elizabeth Strout's work. But The Ocean House didn't work for me. The publicity blurb says 'The Ocean House weaves an exquisite world of complicated family tales on the Jersey Shore.' Complicated is right. I found the writing restless and fidgety. I felt confused. If ever a book needed a family tree, this is it. I couldn't get a handle on the characters at all, let alone figure out how they were connected.

I abandoned this read at 33%. I really wanted to like The Ocean House of which, btw, the only mention made of it by the time I abandoned the read was that it was let out for the summer and Cece was expected to clean it when the tenants moved out in return for subsidized rent on her apartment.

I think the cover is exquisite. I would have liked the contents to be equally so.

Reading is a personal and subjective experience, and what appeals to one may not please another. So if you enjoyed the excerpt from The Ocean House, and the plot outline appeals, please do go ahead and read it. Just because it wasn't for me, doesn't mean that you won't enjoy this.

⭐

#TheOceanHouse #NetGalley

THE AUTHOR: Mary-Beth Hughes is the author of the bestselling novel Wavemaker II, a New York Times Notable Book, and the acclaimed collection Double Happiness, which earned a Pushcart Prize. Her latest book, The Loved Ones, was a New York Times Editors' Choice. Her stories have been published in The Paris Review, Ploughshares, Georgia Review, and A Public Space. She lives in Brooklyn and Rhinebeck, New York. (Amazon)

DISCLOSURE: Thank you to Grove Atlantic via Netgalley for providing a digital ARC of The Ocean House: Stories by Mary-Beth Hughes for review. All opinions expressed in this review are entirely my own personal opinions.

For an explanation of my rating system please refer to my Goodreads.com profile page or the about page on sandysbookaday.wordpress.com

This review and others are also published on Twitter, Amazon, Instagram and my webpage.

I received an ARC of this story collection from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

I enjoyed this collection of short stories about various dramas in domestic life.

I struggled a bit with this book. It was a bit all over the place. It still held my interest and kept me reading. I think it was more the way it was written.

In the same vain as the infamous Olive Kitteridge, Mary-Beth Hughes gives us a short story collection that centers around one town and the people who live there.

The setting, the Jersey Shore, these stories predominantly follow Faith and her family through many decades. Intertwined we meet many other characters that have their own voices.

Like many short story collections, I feel like I am on the fence with them. I love some of the stories and others are just so-so. There is enough to keep the reader interested, just beware, there a few you have to slog through.

Thank you NetGalley and Grove Press for an Advanced Reader’s Copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Broken families, mental illness, aging parents and the dynamics of family relationships of all ages are covered in this collection of short stories that are all connected with a spider's web of threads.

Enjoyable to me, but I can see how some readers may get lost.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publishers for the opportunity to read and review this book.

This book was hard to get into and I never really succeeded in my effort. I found the first story strange and it seemed to go downhill from there. This is a book of short stories, but many of them contain characters with the same names. It was unclear whether they were intended to be related - I kept trying to make connections, but they never fit together properly. All in all, the book didn't work for me in any regard. The characters and stories were very jumbled, and I didn't enjoy either of the them. Frankly, I was glad when I turned the last page and could put it away!

My thanks to NetGalley and Grove Press for allowing me to read an ARC of the book which is scheduled to be published 1/12/2021. All opinions disclosed here are indeed my own. A true miss for me!

I liked the synopsis so was really interested to read the book. However, I could not get into the story. I tried chapter after chapter, but neither the plot nor the characters resonated with me. This book was a miss for me.

I've come to the conclusion that I need to stop requesting short story collections. They are so difficult to review as a whole. Not going to lie, I didn't finish all of the stories. I sort of enjoyed the stories that were somewhat connect, or shared the same world. I just really wasn't in the mood for the rest of the stories. I may check out other work from this author because the writing was pretty good.

A completely disjointed series of stories that failed to come together to create one cohesive novel. The first part of the book was quite enjoyable but it quickly fell apart.

I did not get on with this. I struggled from the first story on and liked the second even less. Most of the things that didn’t work for me are very much subjective: the stories that I read were all historical fiction with the accompanying trope and style choices and that is a genre I rarely enjoy. I also found the characters deeply unpleasant (and while I often enjoy that in novels, I prefer more readily sympathetic characters in short stories) and the stories felt cynical in a way that I am sure will be perfect for the right reader. There was also something about the sentence structure that made the prose feel more convoluted than I like.

I wish I had liked this more because I do love interconnected short stories, but I am just not in the mind set to be able to force myself to read things that I am only partly enjoying (for what it’s worth, this probably would have been a three star in the end, so it is definitely not a bad book!).

While neither the title nor the book jacket makes it clear, The Ocean House is a collection of semi-related short stories. Mary-Beth Hughes's writing is fluid and accessible, and those who enjoy the short story form will find the character sketches here absorbing, and the possibilities intriguing.

The Ocean House reads more like a writer's notebook than a tapestry— full of underdeveloped story ideas, some more fleshed out than others, floating in some organizing principle I can’t divine. (The titular ocean house appears infrequently, to no real end, and only a few of the characters reappear in otherwise unconnected vignettes). Each of these stories has the DNA of a good novel in its own right, but as-is, you barely learn the characters' names before their story ends., usually without resolution.

I missed the fact that these were stories at first, as the subtitle doesn’t appear on the cover and the description does make it sound like a novel. Actually, as about half of the stories feature the same characters you get the sense that this could have been a novel if only the author had found the threads to tie the vignettes together tighter.

The stories that featured Faith and her family were the ones I enjoyed most (The Outcast, The Healing Zone, Here You Are), probably as I had a sense of the story continuing. Some of the other stories were jarring (The Elixir, for instance) as it just didn’t seem to fit in at all with the others. I had the same sensation with The Pitch until it became clear in a later story that it dealt with the same characters; still, the style was a departure.

I’ve mentioned this in other reviews, but what I don’t like in short stories is the feeling that things are unfinished. I had this feeling a lot reading these stories and perhaps the saving grace of the collection was the fact that some characters reappeared and we were able to find some conclusions later on. Again, this is probably why I preferred the stories I did.

I also felt confused quite a bit in these stories; I wasn’t always sure what was happening. And as for a unifying theme… loss, perhaps? I do like the cover; however, past the title story I’m not sure how much it fits with the book.

All in all, it’s not a memorable collection or one I would recommend but it’s a decent read (and recently I’ve read some awful ones!)

Thank you #NetGalley and #GroveAtlantic for this ARC.

This book is a series of short stories about a group of people who are loosely related. I found it hard to follow and the characters were not well developed. In a couple of the stories, I finished without knowing what was going on. The setting was to be the Jersey Shore but only one of the stories took place in Long Branch. I was hoping for more about the setting as I live on the Shore..
I received this ARC from the publisher and Net Galley in exchange for an honest review.