Water Music
The bridge at Sagamore was closed when we got there that summer of 1956. We had to cross the canal at Buzzards Bay over the only other roadway that tethered Cape Cod to the mainland. Thus twelve-year-old Lily Grainger, while safe from 'communists and the Pope', finds her family suddenly adrift. That was the summer the Andria Doria sank, pilot whales stranded, and Lily's father built a house he couldn't afford. Target practice on a nearby decommissioned Liberty Ship echoed not only the rancor in her parent's marriage, a rancor stoked by Lily's competitive uncle, but also Lily's troubles with her sister, her cousins, and especially with her mother. In her increasingly desperate efforts to salvage her parent's marriage, Lily discovers betrayals beyond her understanding as well as the small ways in which people try to rescue each other. She draws on her music lessons and her love of Cape Cod-from Sagamore and Monomoy to Nauset Spit and Wellfleet Dunes, seeking safe passage from the limited world of her salt marsh to the larger, open ocean.
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"Wise, funny and deeply moving." -Carol Dines, author of This Distance We Call Love and The Take-Over Friend
"Observant and sensitive, deeply attuned to the beauty and fragility of the natural and human worlds." -Andy Brown, author of The Tree Climbing Cure and Grace Notes and Other Poems
"Peck has written a moving and melodic triumph of imagination and story, a fine harmony of intimacies and passions." -Nicole Helget, author of The Summer of Ordinary Ways
