Patrick Dacey

I won this book from a Goodreads giveaway, and the beautiful cover was just calling to me for a June read! This one releases on June 27th, so I’m excited to present an early review.

The first section of this book follows Robert and Irene as their marriage endures tests. We change perspectives and get to know their individual motivations while also seeing the bigger impacts this has on each other, and more specifically, their two young sons. Irene is a stay-at-home mother, who works hard to raise Andrew and Nathan. Nevertheless, she wonders what would have happened if she’d chosen another path. She toys with the idea of pursuing her artistic side.

Robert on the other side is a man who wants to win. He has this uncontrollable desire to be the best. He uses this desire in his career and in his attempts to make money, but this eventually leads him down the path of fraud and deceit. After participating in a housing fraud scheme, he spends stints in and out of jail. When he isn’t in jail, he is not in contact with his wife and family, but rather is always scheming the next way to make some money.… (mehr)

With a lovely Joel Meyerowitz Cape Cod porch cover, this novel deceptively hints of a serenity that is not achieved until the very end. It's the story of brutality passed from fathers to sons in a family of builders on the Cape. Two sons are raised by a morally corrupt father and a mother who seems powerless to be a positive influence. Its meanders from Las Vegas to Afghanistan to Wall St and then back to the Cape are a long stretch of unhappiness and misery. The last ten pages seem to have been written by another author, and the reader needs to decide if it was all worth it. Me, not so much.… (mehr)

Not unlike Pat Conroy’s The Prince of Tides, The Outer Cape by Patrick Dacey takes an emotional toll on the reader. In order to do this, we have to feel something for at least one of the characters, and this, perhaps is the hardest part in reading it.

These are not the sort of people most of us would want to be associated with, especially the mother and father, but as time passes and the sons, Nathan and Andrew, suddenly become men, we begin to feel for them and understand why they are who they are.

Dacey is a gifted writer, and although I struggled at times with The Outer Cape, I’m glad I read it, because from this reader’s perspective, I’m taking this story as a warning of what not to do as both a parent and husband.… (mehr)