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Over the course of four books, beginning with Mason’s Retreat (1996), Tilghman has produced a wonderful saga about a Chesapeake family, incorporating a superb sense of place with expressive prose and complex interpersonal dynamics. This concluding volume unfolds with the Masons holding their annual gathering at their estate on Maryland’s eastern shore on July 4, 2019. The day proves to be a turning point. As matriarch Kate, recovering from chemotherapy, prepares the poached salmon, her adult daughter Eleanor pens a novel about her seventeenth-century immigrant foremother, and Eleanor’s siblings, Rosalie and Ethan, deal with their complicated romantic relationships. Also invited are their longtime neighbors, plus two French cousins, descendants of the interracial couple in Thomas and Beal in the Midi (2019), from earlier in the series. Amid introductions, reminiscences, and awkward dinner-table conversations, the smoothlly-managed, omniscient viewpoint lets us glimpse each well-defined character, while Tilghman, through their eyes, offers thoughtful reflections on the weight of traditions and the Masons’ slave-owning past. While this novel can stand alone, it also has great respect for the series’ history, bringing many generational strands to a satisfying close.

Publishers Weekly
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Tilghman concludes his Chesapeake Bay quartet (after Thomas and Beal in the Midi) with this understated yet consequential drama of an American family’s reckoning with its colonial heritage. The story centers on an Independence Day celebration at Mason’s Retreat, a house on a former tobacco plantation on Maryland’s Eastern Shore that patriarch Harry Mason purchased decades earlier after his father had sold it off. His wife, Kate, whom he met while she was a burgeoning lefty at UC Berkeley and he was an MBA student at Stanford, feels uneasy about the Masons’ legacy of slaveholding and displacement of Native Americans and sees no cause to celebrate, though she’s happy to be reunited with her adult children Eleanor, Ethan, and Rosalie as she recovers from chemotherapy. Novelist Eleanor is also focused on the past, though she worries readers will be turned off by the slave-owning protagonist of her new book. Rosalie, the oldest of Kate and Harry’s children, harbors resentments toward her husband for letting her shoulder the brunt of their childcare duties, while Ethan, the youngest, contends with his girlfriend’s indifference toward him and the family. Tilghman demonstrates particularly keen insight in his depiction of Kate, as she faces the challenge of poaching a 13-pound salmon while confronting the “forces in the house that resisted change.” It’s a satisfying end to a rich saga. Agent: Henry Dunow, Dunow, Carlson & Lerner. (Apr.)

Kirkus
Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

To the victor go the spoils (and the resulting spoilage). It is July 4, 2019. As the descendants of the Mason family gather for their traditional meal of salmon and peas at the plantation home of their forebears (among the earliest settlers of the Chesapeake Bay environs), the time has come for a reckoning. The legacy of all that was wrought over the course of several generations—displacement of the Indigenous population and the use of enslaved people as laborers among the most troubling practices—weighs upon members of the group to various degrees. Relatives of the current owners are occupied as geologists, aspiring novelists, and real estate executives; all three professions provide support for holiday discussions of time, attachment to place, and responsibility for past actions. The guest list waxes and wanes but includes two French relatives who have been touring the U.S. and bring their perspectives on current U.S. culture and race relations to the table in a no-holds-barred way. The 2019 dinner will go down in the annals of Mason history as the one when the family confronted the past and grappled with how to proceed in the face of the haunted legacy of the familial estate. An elegiac air pervades this thoughtful narrative as several family members are now of an advanced age or dealing with serious illness. Tilghman has examined various lives within the family in three previous novels, beginning with Mason’s Retreat (1996), so some summarizing takes place, but the real star of the show here is the extended dinner conversation(s) occurring between and among the guests. While slyly giving credit to famous cinematic dinner table sequences, Tilghman sets in motion an engaging scene full of confrontation, humor, annoyance, and revelation (and the origins of the salmon and pea menu). A cleareyed look at what history has hidden. Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.