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This beach book is the kind of quick, absorbing read that goes down as easily as a glass of iced lemonade (double sugar) after a day in the sun. But that’s not to say author Jan Goldstein doesn’t try to insert some serious issues into the bathos. At book signings, Goldstein has learned that the novel resonates with readers whose lives have been touched by Alzheimer’s and those raising teen-agers, he says.
“Many people who come are moms and wives who are caught between the crunch of taking care of a parent or taking care of a teenager,” Goldstein says.
His protagonist does both while campaigning for a U.S. Senate seat from California. In the waning days of his primary campaign, candidate Teddy Mathison is summoned to his boyhood home on Nantucket, where his estranged mother, Kate, is dying from Alzheimer’s disease. Worse, Mathison is forced to take along his sullen teenage daughter, Zoe, who despises her father for abandoning her.
Goldstein purposely sets this cauldron of emotions bubbling on an island, where the characters can’t get away from each other. The island also is a symbol of Kate Mathison’s retreat into the solitary world of dementia.
At the beginning of the story, Mathison deserves his daughter’s scorn. He is a handsome conniver who is shallow and insincere, and so lecherous it is hard to forgive him when he eventually has a change of heart.
But the character does change, dramatically. The fun is in figuring out what childhood event skewed his values in the first place, and how he learns the truth and finds redemption.
“I think (the book) is both about redemption and getting a second chance and it’s never too late,” Goldstein says. “It’s never too late to find out what you need to find out or who you need to be.”
The Prince of Nantucket: A Novel
By Jan Goldstein (Shaye Areheart Books, 2007);
ISBN-10: 0307345904 ; ISBN-13: 978-0307345905
