To the New Owners: A Martha's Vineyard Memoir
(Adobe EPUB eBook, Kindle Book, OverDrive Read)
A National Book Critics Circle Award finalist
In the 1970s, Madeleine Blais’s in-laws purchased a vacation house on Martha’s Vineyard. A little more than two miles down a dirt road, it had no electricity or modern plumbing, the roof leaked, and mice had invaded the walls. It was perfect.
Sitting on Tisbury Great Pond—well-stocked with delicious oysters and crab—the house faced the ocean and the sky. Though improvements were made, the ethos remained the same: no heat, television, or telephone. Instead, there were countless hours at the beach, meals cooked and savored with friends, nights talking under the stars, until, in 2014, the house was sold.
To the New Owners is Madeleine Blais’s “witty and charming . . . deeply felt memoir” of this house, and of the Vineyard itself, from the history of the island and its famous visitors, to the ferry, the pie shops, the quirky charms and customs, and the abundant natural beauty. But more than that, this is an elegy for a special place—a retreat that held the intimate history of her family (The National Book Review).
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Madeleine Blais. (2017). To the New Owners: A Martha's Vineyard Memoir. Grove Atlantic.
Chicago / Turabian - Author Date Citation (style guide)Madeleine Blais. 2017. To the New Owners: A Martha's Vineyard Memoir. Grove Atlantic.
Chicago / Turabian - Humanities Citation (style guide)Madeleine Blais, To the New Owners: A Martha's Vineyard Memoir. Grove Atlantic, 2017.
MLA Citation (style guide)Madeleine Blais. To the New Owners: A Martha's Vineyard Memoir. Grove Atlantic, 2017.
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- bioText: Madeleine Blais is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and author. She has written for the Boston Globe, the Washington Post, the Miami Herald, and Chicago Tribune, among other publications, and is a faculty member of the School of Journalism at the University of Massachusetts. Her book In These Girls, Hope Is a Muscle was a national bestseller and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction. She is also the author of Uphill Walkers and The Heart Is an Instrument. She lives in Amherst, Massachusetts.
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- The Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist “gives a familial face to the mystique of Martha’s Vineyard” in a memoir with “gentle humor and . . . elegiac sweetness” (Kirkus Reviews).
A National Book Critics Circle Award finalist
In the 1970s, Madeleine Blais’s in-laws purchased a vacation house on Martha’s Vineyard. A little more than two miles down a dirt road, it had no electricity or modern plumbing, the roof leaked, and mice had invaded the walls. It was perfect.
Sitting on Tisbury Great Pond—well-stocked with delicious oysters and crab—the house faced the ocean and the sky. Though improvements were made, the ethos remained the same: no heat, television, or telephone. Instead, there were countless hours at the beach, meals cooked and savored with friends, nights talking under the stars, until, in 2014, the house was sold.
To the New Owners is Madeleine Blais’s “witty and charming . . . deeply felt memoir” of this house, and of the Vineyard itself, from the history of the island and its famous visitors, to the ferry, the pie shops, the quirky charms and customs, and the abundant natural beauty. But more than that, this is an elegy for a special place—a retreat that held the intimate history of her family (The National Book Review).
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- content: "Witty and charming . . . To the New Owners is full of beguiling stories and memories . . . A deeply felt memoir."
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- source: John Greenya, Washington Times
- content: "A highly readable valentine to a much loved [dwelling] . . . We find fascinating portraits of such eminences as the late Katherine Graham and the couples' good friend, the writer Phil Caputo."
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June 12, 2017
Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Blais (In These Girls) affectionately recounts the summers she spent since the 1970s on Martha’s Vineyard in a small, unassuming cabin that lacked TV and a telephone. Purchased by her in-laws, the cabin became a place where Blais enjoyed relaxing vacations and was also a repository of her family’s history. Blais beautifully documents summers shared with family and friends enjoying unhurried days spent reading, visiting the quirky island towns, and basking in the natural environment. Blais weaves in a history of the island and its famous personages, its beauty, and its tourism-dependent economy. The author chronicles the island’s evolution from a rather remote and quiet place to one overwhelmed by megamansions, traffic, and weekenders’ noisy jets. The cabin was eventually sold, yet it retains its hold on Blais. When packing up for the last time, she laments the loss: “The value of what we could not take was astronomical. How do you pack a view? Can you fold it up, smoothing out the wrinkles, and then protect it with Styrofoam peanuts?” Blais has written a bittersweet account of a wonderfully unplugged summer life.
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May 15, 2017
A Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author gives a familial face to the mystique of Martha's Vineyard in this unfailingly charming reminiscence of summers spent on the island.Blais (Journalism/Univ. of Massachusetts-Amherst; Uphill Walkers: A Memoir of a Family, 2001, etc.) chronicles the final days and robust history of a prominent family's time at their vacation home. The author makes clear she was not born into wealth, nor did she feel that marriage to John Katzenbach, son of former U.S. Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach, afforded her any special entitlements, on the Vineyard or anywhere else. Much more than an account of the privileged class enjoying its privileges, this story of the "shack" at Thumb Point is an engaging tale of a place that, for family or visiting friends, meant a leisurely but active lifestyle raised to an art form. "After a few days by the pond," she writes, "you became a happy animal, scampering barefoot, feral, and fortified." A great strength of the book are the author's portraits of her mother-in-law, the formidable Lydia, writer Phil Caputo, and publisher Katharine Graham, the latter sketch sounding a dirge on the decline of newspapers. Other principal players, including her husband, father-in-law, and year-round islanders, provide additional anecdotes. Readers will forgive the name-dropping because it is largely unavoidable; it serves as a gateway to a more complete picture of Vineyard culture, how seemingly fancy folk enjoy relatively modest lives in decidedly rustic surroundings. The book has the flavor of a finely observed travel book, with Blais offering a brief history of the island and a thorough inventory of its hierarchy, traditions, and manifest (sometimes eccentric) pleasures. In her hands, it is an endearingly quaint community, though not without a tinge of snob appeal, which she gamely dissects. If not quite as funny as billed, there remains much gentle humor and a certain elegiac sweetness that more than compensates--that, and a touching coda.COPYRIGHT(2017) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
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June 1, 2017
The Pulitzer Prizewinning author of In These Girls, Hope Is a Muscle (1994) pays tribute with affection and humor to the shabby but supremely well-located Martha's Vineyard house, owned by her in-laws, where she and her family spent two weeks every summer for many years, and which was sold after her husband's parents' death. Usually keeping nostalgia in witty check, while occasionally allowing it to shape a lyrical portrait of the place, she takes the reader on a verbal tour of the island, recalls weddings and a shocking death, comments on passages from the family logbook, and cites rules for the ideal guest ( Either like dogs, or pretend to ). She places their experience into the wider context of the island as a whole, as the spot where Teddy Kennedy's companion drowned after his car went off the bridge at Chappaquiddick, or where Jaws was filmed. Although the subject matter may be lightweight, Blais fills her book with sentences to savor and memories so clear they seem to become the reader's own.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)
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A National Book Critics Circle Award finalist
In the 1970s, Madeleine Blais’s in-laws purchased a vacation house on Martha’s Vineyard. A little more than two miles down a dirt road, it had no electricity or modern plumbing, the roof leaked, and mice had invaded the walls. It was perfect.
Sitting on Tisbury Great Pond—well-stocked with delicious oysters and crab—the house faced the ocean and the sky. Though improvements were made, the ethos remained the same: no heat, television, or telephone. Instead, there were countless hours at the beach, meals cooked and savored with friends, nights talking under the stars, until, in 2014, the house was sold.
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