Pete and Alice in Maine, Caitlin Shetterly
Pete and Alice in Maine, Caitlin Shetterly
List: $21.99 | Sale: $15.39
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Pete and Alice in Maine
A Novel

Author: Caitlin Shetterly

Narrator: Eileen Stevens, Joe Knezevich, Sarah Naughton

Unabridged: 7 hr 19 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: HarperAudio

Published: 07/04/2023


Synopsis

“Gripping.”—Richard Russo, author of Empire Falls“Shetterly’s debut achieves a subtle grace, a quality of light and shadow worthy of a Bergman film.”—Allegra Goodman, New York Times Book Review""Pete and Alice in Maine is a tender, big-hearted, clear-eyed portrait of a marriage, and a family, in crisis—set during the plague years when the entire world was in crisis. As she investigates the insidious effect of lies, betrayal, fear, and anger, not to mention the mundane joys and wrenching heartaches of everyday life, Caitlin Shetterly gets to the heart of what it means to be a family.” — Christina Baker Kline, New York Times bestselling author of The ExilesA powerful and beautifully written debut novel that intimately explores a fractured marriage and the struggles of modern parenthood, set against the backdrop of the chaotic spring of 2020.Reeling from a painful betrayal in her marriage as the Covid pandemic takes hold in New York City, Alice packs up her family and flees to their vacation home in Maine. She hopes to find sanctuary—from the uncertainties of the exploding pandemic and her faltering marriage.Putting distance between herself and the stresses and troubles of the city, Alice begins to feel safe and relieved. But the locals are far from friendly. Trapped and forced into quarantine by hostile neighbors, Alice sees the imprisoning structure of her life in this new predicament. Stripped down to the bare essentials of survival and tending to the needs of her two children, she can no longer ignore all the ways in which she feels limited and lost—lost in the big city, lost as a wife, lost as a mother, lost as a daughter and lost as a person.As the world shifts around her and the balance in her marriage tilts, Alice and her husband, Pete, are left to consider if what keeps their family safe is the same thing as what keeps their family together.

About Caitlin Shetterly

Caitlin Shetterly is the author of Modified, Made for You and Me, and Pete and Alice in Maine, and the editor of the bestselling Fault Lines: Stories of Divorce. Her work has been featured in the New York Times, the New York Times Magazine, Orion, Elle, Self, and on Oprah.com, as well as on This American Life and various other public radio shows. She is the editor-in-chief of Frenchly, a French arts and culture online news magazine. A Maine native, she graduated with honors from Brown University and now lives with her two sons and husband in her home state.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Beth

I don’t care if you’re from Maine. Don’t—do NOT—trivialize folks who were born there by writing their dialogue in comic phonetics to convey localism. It is reductive and offensive. Caitlyn Shetterly’s writing shows enough flashes of brilliance and her character development shows enough nuance to mak......more

Goodreads review by Allegra

I thoroughly enjoyed this tender novel of a family escaping New York City for Maine during the pandemic. You can read my full review here. [URL not allowed]......more

Goodreads review by June

Some nice writing about the uncertainty of the pandemic, but I didn’t finish the book. I’m probably not the right reader, as it was hard to relate to the narrator’s privileged disconnect, and the lens through which she looks at Mainers.......more