J. Courtney Sullivan

The Cliffs, J Courtney Sullivan, author; Kimberly Farr, Tanis Parenteau, Emily Lawrence, Brittany Pressley, Cassandra Campbell, narrators
As I read this novel, I thought about the different interpretations of the word cliff. People can reach the end of their rope and feel total despair as if they are at the edge of a cliff with nowhere to turn. People can climb to the top of a mountain and on the top of the cliff, they may feel that they have reached the pinnacle of success. From the cliff’s edge, the world’s magnificence may be observed. A cliff can represent desperation, hope, or beauty, or it can represent the name of a home in Maine, an abandoned home with an unknown history, that is haunted by sad memories of the lives and deaths that occurred there.
Many of the characters in this novel stand on cliffs of their own making, as they entertain the reader with thoughts of the supernatural, complete with mediums, psychics and ghosts. Essentially, this novel is about Jane Flanagan. It begins when she is a young teenager who discovers the old, ramshackle, abandoned home on the cliff and loves to hang out there. Her mother has warned her to stay away from it, emphatically. She doesn’t know the reason why, and of course, Jane doesn’t stay away from it. Years pass. Jane goes away to college, marries, has a career, becomes an alcoholic and tries to recover, then returns home when her mother dies. With her sister, she begins to clean out her mother’s home and tries to repair her life as she gives up the bottle once again. Will she be successful? As she looks into the mysteries about the house on the cliff, will she solve her own mystery of self-destruction?
When Jane’s old friend Allison tells her that a woman named Genevieve has purchased the house on the cliff that she loved as a teenager, Jane’s interest is peaked. After she meets Genevieve, she discovers that her son has been seeing the ghost of a little girl who wants him to help her get a message to someone. Jane learns that the marbles that covered the floor, when she had secretly visited the house as a teenager occasionally reappear, although the house was completely renovated. When Jane learns that Genevieve has disturbed sacred ground on the property, she is furious, and unfortunately, an alcoholic like her mother had been, she falls off the wagon. In her drunken stupor, she confronts Genevieve in a rage.
As the reader is taken on the journey with Jane, Allison and Genevieve, as they try to find out who the ghost was, why she was haunting the premises and why she needed help, the story gets more interesting, but it also gets a bit disjointed. One of the problems with this book is that it also had an unstated, but obvious, political agenda. It distracted the reader and made the story confusing at times as it brought up things like vegan meals, climate change and indigenous people. I actually listened to parts of the book over and over again, since you can’t turn pages back in an audio, as I tried to figure out if I had missed something important, until after reading some reviews, I learned that I was not the only one caught off guard. The sudden appearance of a pregnant woman who tells a tale about her life, including the kidnapping of her husband and other male members of her tribe, that took place many years before, actually did not have a previous reference in the story’s narrative. It simply seemed to appear, without rhyme or reason, to introduce the abusive way indigenous people have been treated. Apparently, it does tie-in, albeit loosely, to the story. The woman and the tribe members were the ancestors of Eliza, the housekeeper of a former resident of the same house on the cliff.
As the history and many secrets of this haunted home are explored, the reader learns that we are all haunted by our own memories and secrets. When Jane learns about her own connection to the secrets of the house, will this new knowledge help her to understand her own life choices? Will she become a recovering alcoholic with a new direction or sink further into an empty life at the bottom of a bottle?… (more)

In her latest book J. Courtney Sullivan tackles many contemporary issues through an engaging story and characters we care about. Jane is a focal character in contemporary times, and there are also chapters from the point of view of past women who inhabited a particular house--a ship owners wife, a former Shaker housekeeper, the bereft mother of a dead child, and most recently an affluent woman rooted in urban conspicuous consumption. Jane has escaped to her childhood home after disgracing herself both with her beloved husband and the Harvard job she adored. As she cleans out her deceased mother's house she makes new friends, explores the past, learns about herself, and descends back into alcoholism. As a Mainer, I feel that the fictitious town, set in a very real Southern Maine, is well described, with its tensions between history and progress, locals and flatlanders, reputations and new beginnings.… (more)