I really liked this book, it was not at all what I was expecting, I guess more of a ghost story. And yes, it had ghosts but it was also a deep dive through the indigenous people and cultures of Maine, which I had never learned about, I found it very fascinating.

Women’s lives are a culmination of their circumstances. I’m recognizing this theme in a few of the books I’ve read recently, and I’m here for it.
A historical house in Maine is, dare I say, the main character of this book.

Jane, the modern-day protagonist, is a researcher at Harvard. Her skills and resources allow her to dig into the history of women’s lives within that Maine house. I personally didn’t know anything about the history of Maine, so I was here for it!
This book isn’t a simple story. The author deftly weaves in themes of racism and claims to land with the Abenaki people clashing with the white settlers. The issue also gets a contemporary angle with its concerns for modern Native lives and their rights to the land and water their ancestors had stolen from them.

There’s also a spiritual element to the story. Think: “candle manifestation” and “energy clearing” and reincarnation.
The author also delves into issues with alcohol and dysfunctional families. Jane can try to run away from her family’s issues, but she eventually has to come face-to-face with some of the issues her mother faced.

“The Cliffs” is a mystery novel, but it’s also a study of people and places and how we respect our ancestors and those who came before us. I definitely recommend this book.

Thanks to Netgalley and Penguin Random House for the ARC. Four stars.

This is another great book from J. Courtney Sullivan that ties in the author's usual themes of family, history, and a coastal setting. I liked that this is a beach/summer read and release with a more "gothic" feel, especially with the mystery of the old house. If you are new to this author but like the books of Kate Morton, this would be a good title to start with!

A long abandoned house is the through line in this novel. Jane, the protagonist is obsessed with this house as a teenager in a dysfunctional family. Her research into the house as an adult allow us to see the rich history of the house and the land before it. The novel reveals many different historical themes through the history of the house. I felt it was a little disjointed as I was reading but, I liked how it was all tied up and the end and how they were all really related after all.

I was intrigued by the synopsis of this one. Unfortunately, I didn't think it lived up to it.

Jane was very taken with an old house near her home when she was a teenager. Now many years later she is dismayed to see the so called improvements that have been made to it by the new owner.

I liked the history of the house and it's owners along with many other aspects of the story. I just felt like some parts dragged on a little too long and the book lost its momentum several times throughout.

Not a bad book, but not a great one either.

Thanks to netgalley and Knopf for the arc.

Jane returns home to Maine after making a disastrous mistake at her job and ends up helping the new owner of the house she loved as a teenager find out more about the house's history. Jane discovers more about the previous owners of the house as well as how one part of it intersects with her own family's history. Overall, a story about family history as well as place history, as part of the book focuses on the Indigenous people of Maine and on repatriation. It was a bit hard to follow at times with a huge cast of characters and the multiple side plots and Jane's avoidance of her alcoholism was difficult to read. Recommended to readers who like history and family mysteries.

Absolutely loved this book and would recommend as a perfect summer beach read. Loved the characters, the dual timeline, and the house was the best part of the story and how it changed over time.

I loved all the history included in the book. I loved the history of the people who lived in the house that was the focal point of the story.
There were some appalling things that went on in the book that were hard to digest involving the cemetery and a pool.
I found it difficult to relate to Jane and I didn’t really care for her.

This is a slow-burn novel about a house in Maine and its occupants over centuries. There is a LOT going on here, including ghosts, spiritualism, family trauma, and more. We spend most of our time with Jane, our flawed protagonist from the present-day timeline, but there are some interludes where we hear from other characters. A little busy with a neatly wrapped up ending, a pleasant summer read that will transport you to Maine.

I enjoyed the ghost story and the gothic elements the author used in this book. I didn't enjoy all the extra story lines and info dumping. It easily could have been a hundred pages less if it had more show and less tell. I did a lot of skimming.
Thank you Netgalley for the review copy.

This is a history buffs love letter in fiction to a fictional town. If you love old history of houses, Indians, that sort of thing, you'll love this book.

I loved the multiple layers and time jumps of this book. It’s so interesting to view the same location through so many different lenses. 4 stars because some parts of the book felt slower and it took me longer than I normally do to get back into it

The scenic description drew me right in - an abandoned home overlooking a seaside cliff. Who lived there? What secrets did they hold?

To answer these questions, the author goes through several POVs and time periods which can be tricky to keep track of.

It starts with a mysterious element with intertwining family drama before taking a hard historical shift to draw in commentary on who the land belongs to.

While I found this exploration of Native ownership interesting and important, it felt jarring and drawn out as it was positioned in this part of the novel. However, right after that, it gets juicy with interweaving stories and scandals simmering throughout.

I thought it would take a more mystical turn, but every time it looked like it was tip-toeing in that direction, the story quickly retreated.

Ultimately, it’s a story about home (I’m kind of surprised the title didn’t follow suit) and what that means for a single, special place occupied by so many.

Jane (an archivist) returns to her mother’s home in Maine after a drunken night destroys her career and marriage. She is finally clearing out her mother’s home to sell it and figure out her next steps in life. The old abandoned home on the cliffs (that she was obsessed with as a teenager) has a new owner who is renovating it and wants to know more about its history and hires Jane to investigate. As Jane investigates, the novel is infused with Jane’s backstory and those who have histories connected to the land and to the home. Along with her best friend Allison, Jane not only unearths the story of the house, but also finds a new path forward in healing herself.

I enjoyed the overall story to this one. I did feel like the very long chapters of the backstories of the land and some side characters broke up the flow of the story. Some of them were very dense with factual history that felt a bit like a slog. While I appreciated the well researched historical record (especially as it relates to the original Indigenous population) it felt a bit overkill and disjointed in this book.

Thank you to @aaknopf @pantheonbooks @vintageanchorbooks @netgalley for a digital review copy of this new release

Set on the picturesque coast of Maine in the small town of Awadapquit, Jane is spending time clearing out her mother’s home after she succumbed to lung cancer. Having an elite college education and then working at Harvard for the last ten years, Jane never imagined she would be back in her small town near her best friend Allison, but addiction had other plans for her future.

As Jane is packing up memories of her childhood, she unpacks all the mental baggage she has been carrying around for years. A nearby Victorian house that was her safe haven in high school is now being stripped of its character by an outsider who wants a summer home and Jane the historian is devastated. She works to figure out why this feels like such a loss to her, and while researching the home finds out far more than she bargained for.

The Cliffs reads like literary fiction, so if you are into fast paced books, this is not it. There is a flashback of sorts to one of the residents of the beloved Victorian home for several chapters in the middle, which fits the narrative, but feels like it could have been done in a letter format rather than a separate first person account. The author also has several smaller storylines connected to the same small town that at times feel like unrelated tangents, but eventually are connected in the end. Though I enjoyed much of Jane’s story, her discoveries at times felt preachy to the audience condemning anyone and everyone related to those in the past who did unspeakable things to the marginalized population in the area. Overall The Cliffs was an interesting read, but not my favorite.

Thank you to NetGalley, Knopf, and the author J. Courtney Sullivan for the advanced copy of the book. The Cliffs is out now! All opinions are my own.

Thank you to NetGalley for the opportunity to read an ARC of this book. I am familiar with this author and have read and enjoyed a few of her books. I was intrigued by the synopsis and thought I would be reading a book about an old house and its history. I did enjoy the parts about the house and the women who had lived in it in the past, as well as the story of Jane, who used the house as a getaway as a teenager, but there was so much more going on.

The book was told from several points of view, which I generally like, but in this case, they were so different that at times I felt like I was reading a completely different book from the previous chapter. There were times when it read like a history book, others when it read like historical fiction, and still others when it read like a ghost story. It just went off in too many different directions. And the chapters were so long that by the time I got back to a particular character or POV I had forgotten what happened. I think it would have been a much better book if it had stayed centered on the story of the house it's previous occupants. Although it all came together in the end I thought it was too long and drawn out.

A beautifully written story of an old abandoned VIctorian mansion built on the cliffs of the ocean in Maine. What the mansion meant to the main character early in her life and what it means years later, after it is changed, rebuilt, updated by its new owner. The history, the inhabitants of the home is a beautifully built story in itself! Great read.

3.5 stars, rounded up. The Cliffs is the story of a house: an abandoned Victorian mansion built high on the seaside cliffs outside the small coastal town of Awadapquit, Maine. Jane Flanagan discovered the house as a teenager, and it became a refuge from her volatile mother. Now, twenty years later, Jane's mother has died, and she's returned to Awadapquit after potentially losing both her job as a Harvard archivist and her marriage during a drunken episode at a work event. Jane's Victorian mansion refuge has been completely transformed by its new owner, a wealthy summer person named Genevieve. Genevieve is convinced the house is haunted, and she hires Jane to research the house's fraught history, and the legacies left by the women who lived there in the past.

The Cliffs was my first J. Courtney Sullivan book, and it reminded me in some ways of a Jodi Picoult novel, with some of its thematic elements and the way Sullivan incorporates several topics into the narrative. At the same time, though, Sullivan has a distinct voice and perspective that I appreciated. She clearly did a lot of research into a variety of topics, including but not limited to Maine's indigenous population, the Shaker movement, spiritualism and psychic mediums, and colonialism -- all integrated into a story about generational trauma, alcoholism, motherhood, grief and healing, the complexities of women's relationships, and all the ways a person can be haunted.

Yes, there's certainly a lot going on in The Cliffs. As much as I appreciated all of Sullivan's research, I didn't always find that it was well-incorporated into the narrative, so sometimes the book felt like a history lesson or lecture rather than immersive fiction. For me, this sometimes detracted from the book's true strength -- its strong female characters, their healing and growth -- and made it a less poignant reading experience than I think it would have been otherwise.

Despite being somewhat disjointed and meandering, there is still a powerful, important story being told in The Cliffs: a story about history and heritage and healing, about love and loss and legacy, about acknowledging the mistakes of the past in order to move forward. I'm definitely eager to read more of J. Courtney Sullivan's work.

This is a gorgeous family saga to get sucked into. The story was deeply satisfying and I think it will stick with me.

I received a free ARC ebook of The Cliffs from NetGalley in exchange for an unbiased review.

Love this book. Set in a small southern Maine town, Sullivan immerses readers in the history and beauty that is Awadapquit aka "where the beautiful cliffs meet the sea." (Sullivan surely modeled Awadapquit after my current hometown Ogunquit, "the beautiful place by the sea.") The sense of place that she establishes and its role in the lives of generations of residents is truly astounding. Centered on a seaside cliff, a house incorporates the loves, the loneliness, and the joys of its female occupants and others who love the cliff. Her protagonist, Jane, is a flawed but lovely woman and readers will want her to successfully wade out of the mess she has made out of her life.

Sullivan deftly and beautifully incorporates the indigenous history of the Cliffs with characters who are beautifully rendered. She presents spiritualism, Shakers, and an homage to libraries in this wonderful novel. Additionally, her explanation of epigenetics, generational trauma, is the best I have ever read. (Epigenetics appears in Tommy Orange's Wandering Stars and many other novels.)

Sullivan has written a novel I will think about for years to come.