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Good Harbor
by Anita Diamant

Published: 2001-10-01
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Anita Diamant's international bestseller The Red Tent brilliantly re-created the ancient world of womanhood. Diamant brings her remarkable storytelling skills to Good Harbor -- offering insight to the precarious balance of marriage and career, motherhood and friendship in the world of ...

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Introduction

Anita Diamant's international bestseller The Red Tent brilliantly re-created the ancient world of womanhood. Diamant brings her remarkable storytelling skills to Good Harbor -- offering insight to the precarious balance of marriage and career, motherhood and friendship in the world of modern women.

The seaside town of Gloucester, Massachusetts is a place where the smell of the ocean lingers in the air and the rocky coast glistens in the Atlantic sunshine. When longtime Gloucester-resident Kathleen Levine is diagnosed with breast cancer, her life is thrown into turmoil. Frightened and burdened by secrets, she meets Joyce Tabachnik -- a freelance writer with literary aspirations -- and a once-in-a-lifetime friendship is born. Joyce has just bought a small house in Gloucester, where she hopes to write as well as vacation with her family. Like Kathleen, Joyce is at a fragile place in her life.

A mutual love for books, humor, and the beauty of the natural world brings the two women together. They share their personal histories, and help each other to confront scars left by old emotional wounds.

With her own trademark wisdom and humor, Diamant considers the nature, strength, and necessity of adult female friendship. Good Harbor examines the tragedy of loss, the insidious nature of family secrets, as well as the redemptive power of friendship.

Editorial Review

Given the breadth of Anita Diamant's bestselling biblical epic, The Red Tent, it seems natural that her second novel has a much closer focus. Set in the small Massachusetts fishing town of Gloucester, Good Harbor is a slow-paced study of female friendship. Here Diamant can luxuriate in the development of just two principal characters: 59-year-old Kathleen Levine, a children's librarian who is undergoing radiation therapy for breast cancer, and a 42-year-old romance novelist, Joyce Tabachnik, who has bought a summer retreat in Gloucester in the hope of finally writing a "serious" book. The two meet at temple after a service presided over by a newly hired female rabbi. (What joy it must have been for Diamant, who chronicled so much oppression of Hebrew women in The Red Tent, to casually include the presence of female clergy.) Kathleen has no real confidante aside from her husband, Buddy; Joyce is facing estrangement from both her business-minded husband, Frank, and her soccer-obsessed daughter, Nina. What the women are lacking, they find in each other. As their intimacy grows, Diamant sometimes tells us what we already know, breaking into a conversation, for example, to announce how well things are going ("They smiled at each other. They were going to be okay."). This is a moving story nonetheless--short on incident, but with carefully drawn characters and fluid, matter-of-fact prose. --Regina Marler

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