I had so much fun with this book. Everything about it was perfect. The characters, the setting, the drama… impeccable. I loved it so much.

Two sisters who have never met. One lake house to share. The perfect summer read with all of the vibes

Hank Levy dies suddenly of a heart attack on Father's Day and his daughter Vivian is tasked with selling her dad's cabin in Fox Hill, Maine. When she arrives to the cabin, she runs into Lucy, Hank's other daughter that Vivian knew nothing about. Vivian and Lucy have to navigate trauma filled land mines with each other as well as figuring out their own series of unfortunate events.

4.5 stars for me. I really enjoyed getting to know Vivian and Lucy and the secrets that bind them together. Hannah did an amazing job laying out the family dynamics and how each woman (including their mothers), worked through their grief and life complications. Overall, I loved that both Vivian and Lucy stood up for themselves with men who didn't put them first. They were also brave enough to band together and developed an honest friendship after dealing with the trauma passed on to them from their parents and also propelled their mothers to move past the secrets and the grief. We are all products of our parents, blood or not, and have to deal with the trauma(s) that they've left behind.

Thank you so much to Netgalley and Penguin Group Dutton for the Advance Reader Copy!!

new fear unlocked: finding out i have a secret family somewhere after thirty years of living one life

I’m a huge fan of Hannah Orenstein’s other novels and was delighted to receive an early copy from NetGalley. If you are looking for an armchair vacation this is it. This is an adult retelling of the parent trap about two very different sisters raised independently mourning the early death of their father. I really liked the book and think it’s a lovely beach read. Learning about Vivian’s career as a sommelier was very fun. This book definitely has one of my favorite covers it’s just beautiful. Thank you to NetGalley and Dutton for the earc. All thoughts are my own.

I was so excited to read “Maine Characters” after it was lauded as the adult Parent Trap - and it delivered! I enjoyed seeing the relationships between all characters grow and develop, and the dual-POV made the storytelling more powerful. I definitely recommend reading this book as your next vacation read! Best paired with an Adirondack chair and superb lake views.

Two sisters with the same dad raised completely apart end up meeting at his lake house in maine after he suddenly passes away. a story filled with drama, secrets but, most importantly sisterhood. such a beautiful story of grief and forgiveness. after years apart lucy and vivian finally get to be the sisters they always wanted.

the cover and the title are so cute and creative that it left something to be desired in the writing. overall, it was okay, but i wouldn’t recommend it over other books at this point

thank you so much for the arc!

i am dnfing for now. i am having a hard time connecting with the characters and the story. i will hopefully come back to this one soon!

Life is messy and family is messier. I loved that this book is about two women working through their work and romantic complexities and challenges, yes but even more so, about what it means to make, find, and be family. The strengths of the books are also its challenges: it's complex, which gives lots of opportunities to engage, but fairly predictable plotting makes it feel, at times, both complex and surface-level. I'd love to have seen more character development, but also think this will be a book I'll sell to a specific type of reader who is looking for a family story that falls more into beach read versus literary read (ex: Celeste Ng.)

this was slow to get into at first but once i started to connect to the characters (and boy oh boy did i) it really started to pick up. I loved how the characters faults and strengths made them feel more grounded and dimensional.


thank you to NetGalley for providing this ARC!! 3.5 Stars

I liked this book, the author represented the themes of love, loss, self-discovery and so many more really well in my opinion. However the pacing of certain sections of the book felt rushed and others where really slow. The book is well written, don't get me wrong, I just really had a hard time with the caracters.

Thank you to Penguin Group and Netgalley for this ARC of Maine Characters!

I think this book does a lot of things right -- it explores grief in a very wholistic way, it displays the complications of death and relationships. But overall, I think this book just wasn't for me. Some of the aspects of the book (including the ending) were a little chaotic and unsatisfying. I found it hard to get through and it included tropes that I'm very much against.

However, I did love the setting. It had me aching for a trip back to Maine!

Thank you net galley and publisher for this ARC. At first this story and book description sounded so good and interesting. It got a bit slow for me. I enjoyed how everything came together and the growth and journey shown for each character.

I adore Hannah Orenstein and I was really excited to read this book, but I thought it was lackluster. The premise is clever and emotional: In a more mature scenario reminiscent of The Parent Trap, half-sisters Vivian and Lucy meet at their father's lake house in Fox Hill, Maine shortly after his death. Together, Vivian and Lucy must navigate their grief over the death of their father and navigate the thorny terrain of their half-sibling relationship. Sadly, I thought the characterizations were too broadly drawn and the plotting was predictable. While I understand Orenstein wanted to create a stark contrast between Vivian and Lucy, it made them into archetypes — Vivian is the spoiled, jaded New Yorker with a fancy job who's sleeping with her married boss and Lucy is the sheltered, small town schoolteacher who's recently separated from her high school sweetheart and who has basically no backbone. I didn't really care for either character and the growth they experienced was predictable and trite. Orenstein has some nice passages in the book and she paints a vivid picture of the fictional Maine town, but this was overall too maudlin and too slow paced for me.

What a beautiful cover and blurb, right? This is a story about Vivian and Lucy, half-sisters mourning their father's sudden death of a heart attack and that they did not have a relationship until now. We don't know the inner workings of why Hank chose to keep his families separate while trying to have a relationship with both of his daughters. It was honestly unnecessary and pretty sad. I can say without spoilers that this book has sort-of-a happy-ish ending? Some endings are just heartbreaking and others are of the grand "first kiss/proposal/team wins the championship/winning court case" variety. This ending is neither of these. It is somewhere in the middle and I think that's what makes it a bit unsatisfying.

In my own ratings scale, I use three stars for "I like it, recommend" and two stars for "missing something, not for me" and I rated this as 3 (2.5) because this is well written, it is a good story, it has good pacing and good anecdotes. I simply did not like these characters, they were in difficult situations but handled them poorly, there was no way to turn back the past and the love triangles were...a lot. There are 4 love triangles in this book---
Vivian/Lucy/their father Hank
Hank/Celeste (Vivian's mom)/Dawn (Lucy's mom)
Vivian/Oscar (NYC married boyfriend)/Caleb (Small town bartender)
Lucy/Patrick (soon to be ex husband)/Harrison (new love interest)

That's a lot of people, y'all. It is a lot of characterization and is honestly ambitious. Harrison and Caleb are basically good guys but we don't get the time to get to know them. Dawn is the best character, but she gets very little time and it isn't her story. Everyone else is kind of awful.

Thanks to @netgalley and @duttonbooks for the ARC. Book to be released May 13, 2025.

Thank you, Netgalley and Penguin Group Dutton, for the ARC in exchange for my honest review! 

I've never read Hannah Orenstein before, but I will now be looking for her! The description of an adult Parent Trap made me want to read this. It's one of those rare books that keeps you hooked even if you're not totally in love with the characters. They were very flawed, but I think that's what kept me reading because of that...their flaws are what made them real and relatable, whether or not I liked them. I used to summer in Maine often as a kid throughout my young adult life, and this book brought me back to my happy place because, like me, the girls had ties to Maine.

Additionally, there was character development and dynamics that I loved reading about on screen. This was more of a book about family relationships than romance, but it was just such a good read, and I was okay with it. It's a perfect spring/summer read!

P.S.- I additionally loved the dual POV from the sisters.

Excellent book about 2 sisters who meet for the first time after their dad's death. It was beautiful. I cried!

Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for allowing me to read this arc in exchange for an honest review!

I'd like to thank NetGalley and the publishers for providing a copy of this book. I enjoyed the setting and the "Parent Trap"-inspired premise. This book will likely appeal to fans of Carley Fortune and Emily Henry, as it shares a similar tone and setting. While I didn't fully connect with one of the sisters, overall, I found the book to be an enjoyable read.

I read this book as an ARC from the publishers and NetGalley.
What initially jumped at me was the title, anything including Maine I enjoy trying to read as who doesn’t want to read a book set where they live.
While the storyline was good, it was a slow book. There was parts that kept me interested and parts that could have been done without.
You follow two many characters at times and then the end is too few. The two main characters Lucy and Vivian start to foster new relationships romantically but the follow through lacks, we are introduced to both love interests without finding out what happens or in one case nothing happening although wrote like we would follow it.
The much anticipated meeting of the moms also falls under the radar. We are wildly anticipating the meeting, likely hoping for drama (I know I was) and it was flat, boring and basic.
What I’m trying to get out is that while the storyline and idea is great it is flat, and anticlimactic