After fifty years of marriage, Betty Weissmann’s husband wants a divorce. Blindsided by the betrayal and banned from the apartment she lovingly decorated, Betty retreats with her two daughters to a friend’s rundown beach cottage in Westport. Betty, Annie, and Miranda work together through a painful time for all of them.

I’ll admit this book sounds depressing, and there are parts that will make you cringe with the humiliation that each of them faces, but Schine is able to see the humor in the most painful of situations. “There was an awful, endless, complicated lawsuit that had frozen all of Mirand’s assets. As if they were so many lamb chops, Betty thought, imagining the assets wrapped in aluminum foil and coated with a white film of ice.” Schine uses irony and compassion to walk us through the story of three women facing devastation together. Loosely based on Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen, The Three Weissmans of Westport is a story you won’t soon forget.