Accidental Happiness
A Novel
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- $5.99
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- $5.99
Publisher Description
Someone once told me that groupings of objects should be displayed in threes. Three provides both tension and balance among items of varying size and heft. My sister’s accident made me an only child; my husband’s accident made me a widow. Part of me will always believe that Angel was the third, the one that left me with hope.
After her husband’s unexpected death at the age of thirty-six, Gina Melrose becomes a “live-aboard” on his boat, docked at a marina in coastal South Carolina, near the home she and Ben once shared. In this temporary, borrowed existence on the water, she settles into numb survival. But Gina finds her life taking yet another dramatic turn late one night when a woman named Reese disrupts her quiet world. With Reese comes a daughter: a charming girl named Angel.
After a rough start, Gina realizes that, strange as it may seem, she’s drawn to both Reese and Angel. Their sudden appearance shatters the stillness–and Gina is remade. She is fascinated by Reese, who seems both invincible and vulnerable–and whose past may hold the key to Gina’s future. Gina begins to realize that for the first time since Ben’s death, she’s getting her senses back. As both pain and joy reenter her world, Gina discovers that she is able to accept feeling in order to live fully once more.
But the biggest surprise for Gina is her relationship with Angel. After the painful loss of her sister during childhood, Gina had decided that she would never have children of her own. Struggling through conflicted emotions, Gina’s finds her life unexpectedly transformed by the precocious little girl who may be Ben’s daughter.
This tender, poignant novel movingly explores the bonds of family and the resilience of hope. In the accomplished tradition of the novels of Elizabeth Berg and Anita Shreve, Jean Reynolds Page’s Accidental Happiness is a lyrical, enthralling drama unafraid to examine complex relationships with a clear eye and an honest heart.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Two women who loved the same man are thrown together after his death in this smoothly written second novel by the author of A Blessed Event. After losing her 35-year-old husband in a freak accident, Gina, a freelance writer, moves onto his boat on the Charleston waterfront, drinks too much and attempts to create some semblance of a new life. She's shocked out of her grief when an intruder frightens her one night and she responds instinctively, discovering to her horror that she has shot seven-year-old Angel, who happens to be the daugher of her husband's ex-wife, Reese. While Angel is recuperating, mother and child share the boat with Gina, who gets help coping from handsome Derek, who works at the marina. Reese, a pretty, hippie-ish wanderer, is friendly but clearly unstable, and claims she isn't sure whether Benjamin was Angel's father. Gina can't help being suspicious, though a bond begins to form between her and Angel. When Reese's moods start to change radically from one moment to the next, it's clear that something is seriously wrong with her. Meanwhile, Gina is haunted by painful memories of a sister who died as a child. Page steps easily into the shoes of her appealingly flawed characters as she weaves a convincing web of unconventional family relationships.