I listened to this on tape. It was sad but I could see where the familiarity with husband and wife helped them heal over the loss of their son. They just needed to learn how to communicate. ( )

Sam and Hadley West are a couple just trying to survive the soul-shattering loss of their only son in Alaska. They each decide to do this in their own ways: For Sam, a sports journalist, acceptance of his son's death means undertaking an arduous trek by dogsled across the beautiful but forbidding Alaskan landscape to find the spot where Paul died. For Hadley, it means renting a benignly haunted, salt-soaked cottage off the coast of Maine where she can paint and begin to grieve in peace.

Now, at opposite ends of the country, waiting for their divorce to be finalized, they begin to exchange letters through the post - missives filled with longing and truths they have never before voiced. They recall their marriage - its magic moments and its challenges - and begin to rediscover the reasons why they fell in love in the first place.

As Sam risks his life to reach the remote crash site, Hadley begins an equally hazardous inner journey to rendezvous with the mad grief of a mother's heart. At the place where all else is lost, they will meet again.

This is the first time that I read this book, although I did read, and enjoy, The Perfect Summer by Luanne Rice sometime last year. I always enjoy books about family dynamics and give this book an A+! I would definitely recommend it to others. ( )

Letter writing is practically dead, so an epistolary novel based on a (fictional) correspondence between the two main characters requires explanation, to which the author concedes on page 2:

It's been years back--to our courtship really--since I wrote you a letter. And I am beyond email, or any electronic communication. Even to call would take a satellite phone, and I suspect we should stand by our decision to take a break for a while to sort out what our marriage means or how it should end. Letters seem like a more reasoned way to communicate. (p.2)

In the time line of the novel, that would have been the early 1980s. It is an interesting, and complicating choice.

While the authors of the novel, Luanne Rice and Joseph Monninger, are of an age and generation, which is likely to have written many letters, half of their readership will not, perhaps never have written a letter in long-hand.

Many (older) people will agree that letter writing is more intimate. The characters in the novel, or at least Sam, need that kind of quiet intimacy. Apart from the fact that letters are the only real option open to him, as he is on a mush to the plane wreck in a remote location in Alaska. Sam and Hadley live separately, after their marriage had stranded a short while before, but divorce proceedings have not yet started. Three years earlier, they lost their son in that plane crash.

Nostalgia is an important motive in this novel. Particularly Sam is shown to cling to the past, not just in his choice for the letter as a medium of communication, but also, for example, the choice of mushing as a mode of transport, rather than a snowmobile, and more general the way he hopes to bring Hadley back, which may be as hopeless as his pilgrimage to the site of his son's death.

While letters may be the most suitable medium, Sam's letters seem to become too intimate, rather too soon. After only a few exchanges, his letters become almost erotic, which is possible, but not entirely logical in the context of the novel.

Letter writing itself is a important aspect of the story, and is explored in all its facets, ranging from express mail to misdirected letters, and Hadley straining her wrist and so having difficulty to write. A bit far-fetched, it seems, but perhaps a secret nostalgia of the authors for the art of letter writing? ( )

A lovely little book about two people trying to heal from the worst thing that can happen to a parent, the loss of their child. With a schism in their marriage, the divorce in motion, each sets out to try to survive their grief. Sam makes his way by dog sled into an Alaskan winter to see the site where the plane that took his son when down. Hadley retreats to an island off of the coast of Maine and picks up her paintbrush. What begins as a letter Sam writes to Hadley to tell her he arrived at his starting point in Alaska turns into a stream of correspondence in which each begins to talk about their feelings, the pain of losing their son, remembrances of when they met and an examination of their marriage. ( )

It's a creative concept for a storyline: two parents torn apart by the accidental death of their son. The father (Sam) is obsessed with seeing the place where his son (Paul) perished. Driven by that obsession he makes a pilgrimage into the Alaskan wild where his son's plane crashed. The mother (Hadley) artistic and alcoholic, find herself in equal solitude on Monhegan Island, a tiny (586 acre) island off the coast of Maine that really does exist. These parents are as far away from each other physically as their marriage is spiritually. Their story consists of letters written on the brink of divorce - volleying blame back and forth. Through these letters, not only does the anguish of losing Paul wring itself out, but histories are revealed. Grief is only a fraction of the bigger picture. ( )