Trophy House by Anne Bernays – 4/20 Books of Summer

Dannie Faber has a comfortable life as a children’s book illustrator; her children are adults and she splits her time between affluent Belmont, MA and Cape Cod, which she prefers. Her husband Tom teaches at MIT and joins her at the Cape, which is her happy place, when he can. When she isn’t working, she has local friends, including Raymie, with whom to gossip about neighbors who don’t fit in. Primary among these is a millionaire who is building an enormous, hideous house less than half a mile from the Fabers.

Six Degrees of Separation – from Sandwich to Moby Dick

It’s time for #6degrees, inspired by Kate at Books Are My Favourite and Best. We all start at the same place as other readers, add six books, and see where it ends up. This month’s starting point is Sandwich by Catherine Newman (2024). Because it is set on Cape Cod, the book was a local bestseller and I would have bought it for my sister had it been available in July.

Five Things

• Chincoteague is a town on the island of the same name, in Virginia’s Eastern Shore region. It’s a gateway to Chincoteague National Wildlife Refuge, on Assateague Island, which has beaches and wild Chincoteague ponies.

Catching Up with Miss Hargreaves, Poppy, and Summer in Cape Cod

Miss Hargreaves (1939) by Frank Baker

This book is a warning to anyone who ever embroidered a story or made something up that seemed hilarious to him (or her) but perhaps not so much to other people.  Norman Huntley and his friend Henry Beddow are on vacation chatting to a sexton when they make up an eccentric older lady called Miss Hargreaves.  Carrying on with their silliness, Norman sends a letter inviting her to visit his family in the Cathedral town of Cornford.  When he gets home, he is horrified to find someone named Hargreaves has sent a telegram stating she will arrive on Monday!  No one believes Norman when he says he doesn't know her and did not invite her, and once she arrives Norman is torn between pride in his creation, embarrassment at her behavior, and a strange affection for her that comes and goes. Miss Hargreaves' visit to Cornford threatens to destroy his life - unless or even if it is Norman who is behaving irrationally.  This is an amusing story, recommended by Simon at Stuck in a Book.

   

Where Are the Children? by Mary Higgins Clark, her first of 56 straight bestsellers

Title: Where Are The Children?
Author:  Mary Higgins Clark

Publication: Pocket, paperback, 1992 (originally published in 1975)

Genre: Suspense

The Essence of Summer

Where to Go Online

When I visited my sister in Cape Cod two years ago, we went into Internet withdrawal. You say to yourself that it is really getting away from everything without email, but then you remember a couple things you want to check or a message you are waiting for. And you check the hours of the Osterville Library where there are computers. Then we realized that library provides wireless access so we occasionally drove over at night and checked our email on my laptop from the car. Other cars were doing the same thing: the faint glow of laptops slightly illuminated all the cars in the parking lot. The way the cars came, lurked, and departed made it seem as if drug deals were going on - but the drug of choice was online access.

I am not the only person who has noticed these furtive tourists!

We all scream...

Last summer when I was in Tuscany (she wrote oh-so-casually, trying to sound like a world traveler), my sister and I joked that we wanted all our days to be two gelato days. It would not have been hard because we found amazing gelaterias in every town we visited (and did sometimes indulge at noon and again before heading back to our villa). We liked the fact that the servers always urged us to try two flavors at once in our cones, which we tried to keep in the same family, such as raspberry and lemon or chocolate and cream, although others were more daring and went for random combinations. On a hot day, gelato is indescribably delicious. Europeans do seem to take their gelato seriously, and in Vienna there is even a special flavor for dogs.