By A. Manette Ansay, HarperCollins, April 2006

On an ordinary morning in Fox Harbor, Wisconsin, Meg and Rex Van Dorn's lives are irrevocably altered when a drunk driver -- Meg's onetime best friend, Cindy Ann Kreisler -- slams into the Van Dorns' car, killing their six-year-old son, Evan. As Meg recovers from her own injuries, she and Rex are shocked when Cindy Ann receives a mere slap on the wrist. In their rage and grief, they buy a boat to sail around the world, hoping to put as much distance as possible between themselves and Cindy Ann. But when Meg returns to Fox Harbor for a family wedding, she's forced to face the complex ties that bind her to the woman who has destroyed her peace.

From Publishers Weekly

In Vinegar Hill author Ansay's latest, a probing character study, Meg Van Dorn and her husband, Rex, struggle with the loss of six-year-old son, Evan, in a crash with Cindy Ann Kreisler—Meg's best friend from high school and an alcoholic, who was drunk at the wheel. The two file a civil suit that would financially ruin the well-off Cindy Ann, but Meg has a change of heart, given the impending marriage of Meg's older brother to Cindy Ann's sister; it's more a contrived plot device than a genuine narrative event, but it does force Meg to constantly shift her perspective on the tragedy, especially as Ansay offers a sympathetic sketch of Cindy Ann and her troubled past. Most of Meg's emotional cycling takes place on the Atlantic coast, where she and Rex have gone sailing as a coping strategy and have fallen in with various strands of lower-end sailing culture: the book's best energy is spent in places like the Island Girls bar, to which Meg eventfully repairs one night without Rex. The resolution of Meg and Rex's marital issues seems glaringly underwritten in the final chapters, but on the whole, this is a solid and revelatory novel on themes of grief and loss. (On sale Apr. 25)
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A. Manette Ansay: 

A. Manette Ansay is the author of five novels, including Vinegar Hill, an Oprah Book Club Selection, and Midnight Champagne, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, as well as a short story collection, Read This and Tell Me What It Says, and a memoir, Limbo. Her awards include a National Endowment for the Arts Grant, a Pushcart Prize, the Nelson Algren Prize, and two Great Lakes Book Awards. She lives with her husband and daughter in Florida, where she teaches in the MFA program at the University of Miami.
 

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