The Taste of Air Gail Cleare

Published: Red Adept Publishing
Date: September 2016
Format: e-ARC
Pages: 253
Genre: Contemporary Fiction
Source: Author
Rating:
                  

A simple phone call disrupts Nell Williams’s well-ordered life. Her mother, Mary, is in a hospital in Vermont. But her mother is supposed to be safely tucked away in an assisted-living facility in Massachusetts, so Nell can’t fathom why she would be so far from home.

After notifying her sister, Bridget, Nell hops on a plane and rushes to her mother’s side. There, she discovers that her mother has been living a second life. Mary has another home and a set of complex relationships with people her daughters have never met.

When Nell and Bridget delve deeper into their mother’s lakeside hideaway, they uncover a vault of family secrets and the gateway to change for all three women.

The Taste of Air by Gail Cleare is a story ultimately of family. It mostly tracks the story of Mary a mother and her two daughters Bridget and Nell. We go back in time to where Mary was a nurse in Vietnam and the men she met, the men she loved and the one she married.

But Mary has secrets and it is only as Nell and then Bridget care for her up in a Vermont hospital that they begin to question and eventually put two and two together. How did Mary end up in Vermont when they thought she was living in Massachusetts? And why does she have a cottage there? Who is the man Jake who is so upset by Mary's illness?

Bridget is running from her third marriage, back in time she had had an experience that had brought on the ire of her father and she has been in and out of loveless relationships every since. Nell has a good husband and two children, but she is feeling restless and somewhat dissatisfied. So far all she has been is a mother and wife, she wants more. Just like her mother seems to have done so quietly.

I enjoyed watching the story develop, the girls come together, the developing relationship with Jake and his son Adam. And the secrets which eventually outed, which we as the reader were able to put together before the sisters.  

I did feel a couple of aspects of the story were a little undeveloped and that some changes came quickly and one event was only a brief meeting. However this part of the story (Bridget's story) was linked to her mother's experience so I am apt to say well okay.

To sum up, a story I enjoyed and would recommend to anyone who likes a little mystery and some family secrets being revealed.