In this third installment of a historical fiction series, a woman returns to Nags Head, North Carolina, and faces community censure and a husband who is not ready to trust her again.

It is January 1881, and Abigail Whimble has been away from her husband for almost five years, teaching at the State Normal College in Nashville, Tennessee. She and Benjamin, who remains in Nags Head, have fallen out of touch. Now, that strip of sand and surf is calling her home. She has drawn plans for a schoolhouse she wants to build on the barrier island, and her mentor, Graham Wharton, offers to fund the project. But Graham, an older widower, has more than philanthropy on his mind. He is in love with Abby. Meanwhile, Ben, who has recently recovered from illness and psychological despair, leaves the island to restore his soul. Meandering on the surrounding small islands and shoals, Ben serendipitously meets some scientists summering in Beaufort, where they are studying the flora and fauna of the Outer Banks. They hire Ben to collect sea specimens for them, a job that introduces him to the world of academia. The continuing drama of Ben and Abby, who fell in love as teenagers, takes new turns once he returns to Nags Head to find her supervising construction of the island’s first schoolhouse—accompanied by Graham. There are few surprises in Ducharme’s gently flowing narrative, told in alternating chapters by Abby and Ben in their distinctively different linguistic styles and cadences. Although coated with a Hallmark-style gloss, the story has considerable charm as its two protagonists stumble down a path strewn with misunderstandings and past hurt. While the novel works as a stand-alone, the author is not overly generous with clues to her characters’ backstories to fill in the blanks for readers new to the series. Nonetheless, she paints an atmospheric portrait of a time and place; readers will almost feel the warm sand and salty breezes emanating from the pages. And there’s a wealth of information about the intricacies—and beauty—of the sea life that surrounds the island.

An enjoyable, romantic read with intriguing social and historical nuggets.

A heartbreaking yet uplifting novel that explores the destruction and beauty of love.

Set between 1875 and ’76, Ducharme’s story—this being the sequel to The Outer Banks House (2010)—is about love and its many faces, from young and reckless to unrequited. Specifically, she explores the unlikely passion that forms between smart, affluent Abigail Sinclair and uneducated, penniless Benjamin Whimble. The people of this tightknit island community on the Outer Banks, off the coast of North Carolina, are connected by their collective poverty and abiding love for the sea. Outsiders are generally unwelcome. When Abigail’s family visits for a summer, she starts teaching Ben, her father’s fishing guide, how to read. His love for literature and for his teacher grows, and slowly he drifts away from longtime girlfriend, Eliza Dickens, eventually leaving her to marry Abigail. Although this new love is strong, tragedy tests it. Seven years later, the worst behind them, the couple picks through their past separately, putting together the pieces of themselves they lost along the way. Meanwhile, all these years later, plucky and independent Eliza has never fully recovered from losing Ben. She fights for his return and learns much more about herself in the process. Supporting characters, many with equally interesting lives, float in and out of the story as well. Ducharme beautifully shifts among love stories, weaving lives together. She also daftly expresses the tensions between economic classes. In her fog of love, Abigail joyfully leaves behind the security of her life at home so she can be with a man who could never financially provide for her in the ways she’s accustomed; only after the wedding does it hit her. “Words had failed us that night, and I’d welcomed the silence,” she thinks. “Words had escaped me the next morning as well but in a different way, when I came to realize that I was married to a fisherman for the rest of my days.”