The Harbormaster's Daughter

Description

The story of a mother and daughter in an idyllic Cape Cod town...

On a freezing January night, LaRee Farnham answers a knock at her door to find a policewoman holding three-year-old Vita Gray, whose mother has just been murdered a few miles away. LaRee raises Vita with fierce love and attention, at the same time trying to shield her from the aftermath of the murder, which has deeply divided the histoiric village of Oyster Creek.

Born out of wedlock, Vita is the product of the town's two very different cultures: the hard-working fishing families of Portuguese descent and the "washashores" from the mainland, who've drifted to the coast for its beauty. At sixteen, Vita is shy and isolated, estranged from her father, and bullied at school, but she is determined to come out of herself, step-by-step.

When the shocking details of her past surface suddenly, Vita feels utterly betrayed by those closest to her, and the fraught tension between Oyster Creek's two cultures comes to a head. LaRee must ask hard questions about herself as a mother, while Vita turns to unexpected avenues to find meaning and discovers that the truth is almost never found in black-and-white...

About the Author

HEIDI JON SCHMIDT is a graduate of the Iowa Writers Workshop and author of five books,THE HARBORMASTER'S DAUGHTER,THE HOUSE ON OYSTER CREEK, THE BRIDE OF CATASTROPHE, DARLING?andTHE ROSE THIEVESHer essays and stories have been published inThe New York Times,The Atlantic, Grand Street, Yankee, The Boston Globeetc., and heard onNational Public Radio. Her stories have been included inThe O'Henry Awards, Best American Nonrequired Reading, Twenty under Thirtyand others.She is married to the writer RD Skillings, and has lived in Provincetown Massachusetts for 30 years.The Washington Post Book World has said "It is impossible to disentangle the comic from the tragic in Schmidt's writing. She is incapable of cliche."Goodreads is telling me my influence list is too long (and I was being very minimalist!) so I will put it here instead!George Eliot,John Cheever,Laura Ingalls Wilder,Philip Roth,Oscar Wilde,Veronica Geng,Alice Munro, Katharine Mansfield,John Steinbeck