Welcome Home, Stranger by Kate Kristensen

I really enjoyed this book--written by an author with a lot of other books, lucky me, and set in coastal Maine, a place of my childhood. Rachel is coming home, but only after her mother has died, and there is a lot of back and forth about how that happened and should it have happened. The bottom line for me was that her mother was a toxic person for Rachel, even though for a lot of people she was fun loving, the bottom line is that she was cruel behind closed doors, competed mercilessly with her daughters, and pitted them one against the other for all of her life, and into her death. So way to go Rachel for avoiding all that. What Rachel does not avoid is a divorce from her gay husband, his declining health, having to make up with her sister, and coming to terms with middle age realities amidst a reckoning with her past. This is beautifully written and while you can mostly see the ending from a mile away, it is still lovely to get there and behold.