One summer Jim Sterba, veteran war correspondent, accepts an invitation for a weekend visit from a woman he barely knows, author Frances FitzGerald. He arrives and discovers a secluded little house on the Maine coast, with evergreens and blackberry bushes all around, views of forested mountains, and a fjord full of seabirds and sailboats.
He visits again and gradually falls in love with his host as much as her place. The two couldn't have had more disparate childhoods, but their intelligence, ambition, and independence propelled them both into writing careers and kept them single, until now.
In this Tracy-Hepburn-style romance, the down-to-earth newspaperman charms the sophisticated New Yorker. Their long path to real love has us cheering them on, as well as itching for a visit to idyllic Mount Desert Island.
Journalist Jim Sterba grew up fatherless on a farm in Michigan. Pulitzer Prize-winning author Frances "Frankie" Fitzgerald enjoyed a privileged childhood. Despite their dissimilar backgrounds, they fall in love, marry, and move into Frankie's place, an idyllic, isolated cabin on Mount Desert Island, Maine. Narrator Christopher Lane does an admirable job relating Sterba's morning jogs, the couple's icy dips in Somes Sound, and the exhausting hikes Sterba fondly refers to as "Frankie's Survival School." From the "proper" way to eat lobster to Sterba's war with mice in the cottage (he consults Sun Tzu's THE ART OF WAR), Lane keeps the tone appealing. This is a love story with recipes celebrating the delectable dishes life offers--culinary and otherwise--if we're conscious enough to notice. S.J.H. (c) AudioFile 2004, Portland, Maine
