LIGHTS on the SEA

The author sent me a copy of his novel to read and review:

Wow, what an opening! A raging thunderstorm in the fictitious town of San Remo de Mar on the island of Brent knocks Harold and Mary Rose Grapes’ house off a hundred foot cliff into the ocean.Yes, that’s right. It slides all the way down into the ocean and sails off. Why didn’t the house sink? Because the house took some of the landscape with it and that was mostly porous volcanic rock, which floats. Sometimes I wonder how some authors come up with these ideas. Anyway, most of house took on substantial damage...but it floated on. The irony of the situation was that the house was scheduled to be knocked down the very next day. Why? Because over the last thirty-five years, the house was inching closer and closer to the cliff’s edge and was a threat to the beach below. As we follow the Grapes on their voyage, we find that they lost their only son, Dylan, in a similar storm thirty-five years ago.

Harold and Dylan (eight years old) were building a ship at an old shipyard with freebie wood when the storm struck. The row boat they were using to get home capsized. “It took Harold mere seconds to resurface. Coughing up salt water, he tried to shout, frantically looking all around, but all he could see was blackness. He managed to grab a piece of lumber that had fallen out of the boat, but he didn’t see any sign of the boat itself. Or of his son." Harold was rescued by a fishing boat...they never found Dylan’s body. Mary Rose never forgave her husband, Harold. Harold never forgave himself. Not for nothing, didn’t the couple ever hear the term, out of sight, out of mind? I know that sounds callous, but it becomes a vital point when the Grapes meet an inuit family later in the story. Anyway the boat they were building (which was going to be their home) was taken apart to build the house on the cliff.
 
So as the storm hit their house thirty-five years later, the Grapes had some bad memories, “If anyone in San Remo unable to sleep because of the storm had looked out their window toward the cliff, they would have seen something truly unbelievable. A three-story house tilted at a thirty-five degree angle toward the sea, suspended as if by magic. The yellow house, along with a section of garden attached to the foundation, began to free-fall toward the white-capped sea. The impact was brutal.” As the Grapes tried to fix all the holes in their floating house, The prime question asked between them was, “are we sinking?” and the answer was always, “I think so.” Many problems occur during their housewrecked odyssey, but I will not say anymore...buy your own copy to find out what transpires. The author, Miquel Reina, already an established filmmaker and graphic artist, did a credible job on his first crack at a novel. His character development was first class, as was his ability to elicit empathy for his characters.

RATING: 4 out of 5 stars

Comment: I’ve done a few shipwreck reviews before, but this is my first housewreck (don’t bother looking that up, there is no such word) review. I do have two shipwreck reviews in my blog archive. The first one is Daniel Defoe’s 1719 novel, Robinson Crusoe (I’ll bet you didn’t know that novel was written 299 years ago!) and the second one was Yann Martel’s 2001 novel, Life of Pi. The Robinson Crusoe review can be seen on my 1/1/2016 blog and the Life of Pi review can be seen on my 3/18/2013 blog.

Pi Patel survives 227 days stranded on a small boat with a Bengal Tiger named Richard Parker, while Robinson Crusoe survived two shipwrecks before ultimately spending 28 years as a castaway on a tropical island.