Helpful Score: 10
Great book. I especially reccomend it to anyone who has had their lives touched by breast cancer -either their own or a loved one. Also a great story about friendships and the healing powers friendships have.
Helpful Score: 7
Set in the small Massachusetts fishing town of Gloucester, Good Harbor is a slow-paced study of female friendship. Here Diamant can luxuriate in the development of just two principal characters: 59-year-old Kathleen Levine, a children's librarian who is undergoing radiation therapy for breast cancer, and a 42-year-old romance novelist, Joyce Tabachnik, who has bought a summer retreat in Gloucester in the hope of finally writing a "serious" book. The two meet at temple after a service presided over by a newly hired female rabbi. (What joy it must have been for Diamant, who chronicled so much oppression of Hebrew women in The Red Tent, to casually include the presence of female clergy.) Kathleen has no real confidante aside from her husband, Buddy; Joyce is facing estrangement from both her business-minded husband, Frank, and her soccer-obsessed daughter, Nina. What the women are lacking, they find in each other. As their intimacy grows, Diamant sometimes tells us what we already know, breaking into a conversation, for example, to announce how well things are going ("They smiled at each other. They were going to be okay."). This is a moving story nonetheless--short on incident, but with carefully drawn characters and fluid, matter-of-fact prose.
Helpful Score: 5
This was a satisfying read...the story of two women at different points in their lives, relying on each other for support and guidance.
Helpful Score: 4
This was a very good book about women friendships.
Helpful Score: 2
I thoroughly enjoyed this book. The women in the book remained a part of my spirit for weeks after I read it.
