The Captain's Daughter
Meg Mitchell Moore, 2017
Knopf Doubleday
320 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780385541251
Summary
An emotionally gripping novel about a woman who returns to her hometown in coastal Maine and finds herself pondering the age-old question of what could have been
Growing up in Little Harbor, Maine, the daughter of a widowed lobsterman, Eliza Barnes could haul a trap and row a skiff with the best of them. But she always knew she'd leave that life behind.
Now that she's married, with two kids and a cushy front-row seat to suburban country club gossip in an affluent Massachusetts town, she feels adrift.
When her father injures himself in a boating accident, Eliza pushes the pause button on her own life to come to his aid. But when she arrives in Maine, she discovers her father's situation is more dire than he let on. Eliza's homecoming is further complicated by the reemergence of her first love—and memories of their shared secret.
Then Eliza meets Mary Brown, a seventeen-year-old local who is at her own crossroad, and Eliza can't help but wonder what her life would have been like if she'd stayed.
Filled with humor, insight, summer cocktails, and gorgeous sunsets, The Captain's Daughter is a compassionate novel about the life-changing choices we make and the consequences we face in their aftermath. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—ca. 1971-72
• Raised—on military bases around the US
• Education—B.A., Providence College; M.A., New York University
• Currently—Newburyport, Massachusetts
Meg Mitchell Moore is an American author of several novels, including her most widely known, Admissions (2015). With a father in the U.S. Navy, she grew up on military bases around the country, eventually spending her senior year in Winter Harbor, Maine, where she graduated from high school.
From there Mitchell went to Providence College to earn her B.A. and spend a junior year abroad at Oxford University. Then it was on to New York University for her M.A. in English literature.
Following her school years, Mitchell moved to Boston, becoming a writer for technology magazines and, later, for a number of business and consumer magazines.
When her husband took a new job, the family—with an infant daughter and another on the way—moved to Vermont. It was a turning point for Mitchell, who eventually applied and was accepted into the storied Bread Loaf Writers' Conference at Middlebury College.
As Mitchell says on her website, she took up writing at a very young age: the moment she "figured out how the cursive T and F were different. So while she always wanted to write, Bread Loaf convinced her that she needed to.
Mitchell's debut The Arrivals came out in 2011, followed the next year by So Far Away. Her third book, Admissions, was published in 2015. Regarding the length parents will go to get their children into top colleges, the novel was inspired by living in California for a single year. There Mitchell witnessed parents who would do what it took, no matter the toll on the family, to ensure their children got the best (and most expensive) shot in life. Admissions was well received: Publishers Weekly called it "a page turner as well as an insightful character study."
A fourth novel, The Captain's Daughter (2017), takes place in Maine, a setting loosely based on Winter Harbor where Mitchell spent her last year in high school. (Adapted from various online sources and the author's webpage.)
Book Reviews
Eliza and Rob face romantic temptation during their time apart, which is the least interesting part of a story that otherwise deftly mines issues of loyalty, class, and what it means to be a parent.… [A] moving novel.
Publishers Weekly
Moore focuses on relationships, loss, and change though the eyes of warm and likable everywoman Eliza. Verdict: A summer read with boats, the ocean, and sunscreen but focused on the life-changing events and the power of love and family to deal with life's problems. —Jan Marry, Williamsburg Regional Lib., VA
Library Journal
[A] mildly thoughtful, mainly comforting slice of domestic pie.… Moore raises some interesting issues about class and the importance of money to happiness, but by solving her characters' problems too neatly and painlessly she undercuts the novel's seriousness.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
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