Good Harbor: A Novel - Hardcover

Diamant, Anita

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0743225325 ISBN 13: 9780743225328

Publisher: Scribner, 2001

Synopsis

From their first meeting, a friendship grows between two women who have each reached a crossroad in her life--fifty-nine-year-old Kathleen, whose sister had died of breast cancer and who has recently been diagnosed herself, and the slightly younger Joyce, increasingly distant from her teenage daughter, assessing her marriage and family, and struggling to write a second novel. 200,000 first printing.

About this title

Review

Given the breadth of Anita Diamant's bestselling biblical epic, The Red Tent, it seems natural that her second novel has a much closer focus. Set in the small Massachusetts fishing town of Gloucester, Good Harbor is a slow-paced study of female friendship. Here Diamant can luxuriate in the development of just two principal characters: 59-year-old Kathleen Levine, a children's librarian who is undergoing radiation therapy for breast cancer, and a 42-year-old romance novelist, Joyce Tabachnik, who has bought a summer retreat in Gloucester in the hope of finally writing a "serious" book. The two meet at temple after a service presided over by a newly hired female rabbi. (What joy it must have been for Diamant, who chronicled so much oppression of Hebrew women in The Red Tent, to casually include the presence of female clergy.) Kathleen has no real confidante aside from her husband, Buddy; Joyce is facing estrangement from both her business-minded husband, Frank, and her soccer-obsessed daughter, Nina. What the women are lacking, they find in each other. As their intimacy grows, Diamant sometimes tells us what we already know, breaking into a conversation, for example, to announce how well things are going ("They smiled at each other. They were going to be okay."). This is a moving story nonetheless--short on incident, but with carefully drawn characters and fluid, matter-of-fact prose. --Regina Marler

About the Author

Anita Diamant is a prizewinning journalist whose work has appeared regularly in the Boston Globe Magazine and Parenting magazine. She is the author of six books about contemporary Jewish practice. The Red Tent, her first novel, was a national bestseller and the Booksense Book of the Year. Diamant lives in Massachusetts with her husband and daughter.

About this edition

• Publisher: Scribner
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0743225325
• ISBN 13: 9780743225328
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 256