Water Music

In her exquisite novel, Water Music, Marcia Peck transports us to Cape Cod, where this wise, funny, and deeply moving novel unfolds over the course of a summer. The story, told in Lily’s eleven-year-old voice, recounts the growing tensions in her parents’ marriage—tensions over money and her parent’s different family backgrounds. Against the mother’s wishes, Lily’s family returns every summer to be near her father’s brother and his family,  who own a big house across the bay.  Lily loves her summers at the Cape and tries to understand her mother’s resistance to being near her father’s family.  With her older sister, Dodie, and her cousin, Nicole, adventures are plentiful and filled with humor, recounted with Peck’s amazing ability to capture that moment when the adult world penetrates the innocence of childhood.  Storms, shipwrecks, as well as her parents’ arguments, create a deeper current exposing the ruptures within both families—Uncle George’s affair with his secretary, Aunt Fanny’s depression, the lack of money in Lily’s own family that threatens the final renovations for the summer house her father has staked his savings on completing. And Lily’s own mother, a pianist, grows furious at her husband, a music teacher, for allowing his brother’s affair.  As the summer draws to close, a tragic death occurs, forcing the novel’s deeper question: Can old wounds be resolved, enough to build new dreams? Marcia Peck, a musician herself, brings her understanding of music to the elegant prose that richly describes the rhythms and sounds of the ocean, backdrop to this powerful, tender novel. It is impossible not to love Lily and see ourselves in her struggles as she bravely sheds her innocence to reckon with the adult truths that threaten to tear her family apart.  

—Carol Dines, author of This Distance We Call Love and The Take-Over Friend