The Edge of Winter Book

Neve Halloran and her daughter have shared a fierce love for the austere beauty of Rhode Island s South County ever since Neve guided Mickey s first baby steps along the sandy shore. Now, with Mickey a teenager and Neve s last hope for happiness with her daughter s loving but unstable father gone, both will struggle to make a new life together amid the windswept landscape that sustains them. Captivated by a fragile wildlife sanctuary, Mickey will move toward womanhood in the company of a lonely boy who shares her instinctive way with the creatures of the coast. And Neve will find herself drawn to a man who has devoted his life to the sanctuary, but who is unable to share the pain of a recent loss or reconnect with the father who still bears the scars of World War II.As winter gives way to spring, and spring to summer, a secret will emerge that has lain buried in the depths just offshore for decades, a secret that will galvanize the small seaside community. For the waters bear th...

Publishers Weekly

A maimed owl and a sunken U-boat spark an inordinate amount of activism, romance and multigenerational family healing in this winsome melodrama. Out to observe a single rare snowy owl, high school beauty and passionate bird-watcher Mickey crashes her bicycle and goes sailing into the arms of soulful surfer-dude Shane. She joins his guerrilla campaign to prevent greedy developer Cole Landry from raising said U-boat from its resting place just off their local Rhode Island beach, where the underwater hulk churns up sublimely gnarly waves. Meanwhile, Mickey's struggling divorced mom, Neve, falls for hunky park ranger Tim, who has his own anguished reasons for revering the submarine. When the developer's son, Josh, bashes the owl with a log, Mickey, Shane and Neve take it to an ancient raptor healer, who, in an unsurprising coincidence, turns out to be Tim's estranged dad, Joe O'Casey, the commander of the navy ship that sank the U-boat. From this tangle of totems and relationships erupts a torrent of emotional catharsis and romantic rapture that salves the psychic scars of war. Yes, it's saccharine (" 'Love's what counts in this world... even for snowy owls' ") and soap-operatic, but Rice (Sandcastles) draws her cast of appealing characters sharply, from overexcitable teens to disarmingly deadbeat dads, and her significant storytelling skills are fully deployed. (Feb. 27)

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