by McNear, Mary
I thought about that recently when our daughter, who’s in high school, invited a group of her girlfriends over to our house to get ready for a dance. None of them has a boyfriend, and all of them, it turned out, spent most of that night dancing with one another. But no matter. This was clearly beside the point. Because the point, as they were discovering that night while they gave one another manicures and wobbled around in unfamiliar high heels, was the sense they shared that something might happen at the dance. What it was they didn’t know, but the possibility of it hung in the air that night more palpably than the Nicki Minaj perfume my daughter insisted on spritzing over everyone.
It doesn’t matter what age we are. We remember that emotion. And even better, we still feel it! Not when we’re getting ready for a dance, maybe. But at other moments that sense that something might happen finds and surprises us. I tried to capture that feeling—that jittery, scary, but mostly delicious feeling—when I wrote about Allie’s falling in love with Walker. Because the next best thing to feeling something yourself is reading about someone else feeling it.
Where do you get story ideas?
As I said above, I got the idea for Allie and Wyatt’s story line watching the news. But I look for ideas every summer when I go back to the Midwest. Except for my summers there, I’ve lived in the city all my life, so I have an outsider’s fascination with small-town life. When we go into the town five miles from our cabin, I like hanging out at the little coffee shop or in the tiny public library, which is housed in a converted log cabin. I think about all the things the people who live there know about one another, but I also think about all the things they don’t know about one another. The things they don’t know about one another are intriguing, and are often the subjects of my novels!
Discussion Questions
1. Allie is torn between grieving for her deceased husband, Gregg, and falling in love with Walker. Is there an acceptable amount of time to grieve for a loved one? Must Allie stop grieving in order to move forward in her life?
2. Allie abruptly ends the relationship with Walker after Caitlin shows up at his house. She tells Walker she needs to protect Wyatt from the uncertainties of their relationship. Does she do the right thing? Is she simply protecting Wyatt? Or is there more to it than that? Is her reaction unreasonable?
3. After living in the cabin on Butternut Lake for only a couple of months, Wyatt tells Allie it feels like “home.” What makes a place “home”? Does time have anything to do with it?
4. Why does Allie owe it to Gregg to remember him? How does Allie balance remembering Gregg and enjoying her new life with Walker?
5. Jax deceives Jeremy twice. First she fails to tell him that Joy is Bobby’s daughter. Later she doesn’t tell him that she’s withdrawn ten thousand dollars to pay off Bobby. Is a lie of omission—especially a big one—just as reprehensible as an outright lie?
6. Bobby’s appearance in town is an opportunity for Jax to come clean and tell Jeremy the truth. But she doesn’t. Does Jax believe that Jeremy will no longer love her if he knows the truth? How does Jax underestimate Jeremy’s love for her? And how might her own unhappy childhood have compelled her to deceive him?
7. Jeremy knows from the beginning that Joy is not his daughter. Should he have told Jax when Joy was born that he knew the truth but loved them both anyway? By not doing so, was he complicit in Jax’s deception?
8. What does Caitlin’s nightgown symbolize for Walker? Is his inability to send the nightgown back to Caitlin or just throw it out a sign that there is unfinished business between them?
9. When Caitlin tells Walker that she’s pregnant, he admits he’s not really father material. He then remembers his troubled relationship with his own father. To what extent does your relationship with your own parents influence your capacity for parenting?
10. It’s clear that Walker doesn’t love Caitlin when she arrives at the boatyard to tell him she’s pregnant. In fact, he acknowledges to himself that they have very little in common. So does he do the right thing when he asks her to marry him? Is he just postponing the inevitable? And to what extent is Walker responsible for the marriage not working?
11. When Caitlin miscarries, both she and Walker grieve over the loss of their child. How does each express this loss? And how is this loss different than the death of Allie’s husband?
12. Caroline helps to bring Jax and Jeremy back together, she encourages Allie to give Walker a chance, and she hires Frankie when no one else would. What role does she play in the novel?
13. Daisy is aware that her mother is lonely and prods her to join a book club or go on a date. But, as Caroline realizes, she has lost the ability to take risks. Why would being a single working parent make Caroline risk averse?
14. Despite the fact that Frankie killed a man in self-defense, he takes on the role of protector several times. Who are the people he protects in the novel?
COPYRIGHT
This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
P.S.™ is a trademark of HarperCollins Publishers.
UP AT BUTTERNUT LAKE. Copyright © 2014 By Mary McNear. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
FIRST EDITION
ISBN 978-0-06-228314-6
EPub Edition APRIL 2014 ISBN 9780062283153
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