Coast Road
   Barbara Delinsky
  1998 Simon & Schuster NY USA
   ISBN: 0684855755


When Jack gets an emergency call that his ex-wife & the mother of his children, is comatose after an auto accident along the Big Sur highway, he must put his own busy, lucrative life on hold to tend to his children while they all wait for Rachel to regain consciousness.

What a satisfyingly real & domestic read! Two kids, apart in age to span the age of innocence to the age of suspicion, who were great until their safe normal world is bashed in. Now each copes with their fear in their own ways: with vulnerability & stridency. While they have yearned to have their father back in their lives, one now resents his coming in & making like a parent while the other accepts his return with haunting gladness.

Their father, an ex-husband for six years, has built his own life & was, apparently, quite content wherein he found himself until he answers a call he's refused to hear for many years. Even as he drives his expensive sport car south from San Francisco, even as he bundles his daughters into a car that is designed for two adults, even as he blunders into hospital & home, Jack is realizing he's reached a moment of truth, about his life, his loyalties & his loves.

Then life begins to change for everyone; Jack doesn't go home, doesn't answer his business needs & finds a kind of peace & renewal in the home his ex-wife has made deep in the redwoods along the Big Sur coast. Meanwhile, everyone meets in Rachel's room at the Monterey hospital. Rachel's friends from her new life are frank & interesting, caring about Rachel, the kids & him. Rachel's mother & Jack's mother both arrive to add their spice to the mix.

Something else happens for Jack, a re-awakening: of his appetite for life, of his love for this woman in that hospital bed, surrounded by flowers, children & friends. Jack begins to love again.

I've thought about Barbara Delinsky's Coast Road for weeks after I closed it. Ideas of relationships; images of children & dying pets, of amazing Californian scenery & how people shut away their hearts as they gallop after the brass ring, all simmer & percolate.

It's all about the healing of the human heart.

Also by Barbara Delinsky: Three Wishes, A Woman's Place, Shades of Grace, Together Alone, For My Daughters, Suddenly, More Than Friends, The Passions of Chelsea Kane, and A Woman Betrayed
(04/18/99)

Rebecca