Sometimes all you need is one person to really see you.
Piper Parrish's life on Frick Island—a tiny, remote town smack in the middle of the Chesapeake Bay—is nearly perfect. Well, aside from one pesky detail: Her darling husband, Tom, is dead. When Tom's crab boat capsized and his body wasn't recovered, Piper, rocked to the core, did a most peculiar thing: carried on as if her husband was not only still alive, but right there beside her, cooking him breakfast, walking him to the docks each morning, meeting him for their standard Friday night dinner date at the One-Eyed Crab. And what were the townspeople to do but go along with their beloved widowed Piper? Anders Caldwell’s career is not going well. A young ambitious journalist, he’d rather hoped he’d be a national award-winning podcaster by now, rather than writing fluff pieces for a small town newspaper. But when he gets an assignment to travel to the remote Frick Island and cover their boring annual Cake Walk fundraiser, he stumbles upon a much more fascinating tale: an entire town pretending to see and interact with a man who does not actually exist. Determined it’s the career-making story he’s been needing for his podcast, Anders returns to the island to begin covert research and spend more time with the enigmatic Piper—but he has no idea out of all the lives he’s about to upend, it’s his that will change the most.
Anders Caldwell dreams of seeing his name in a byline at a highly respected publication. He’s honing his craft as a staff reporter at a small local newspaper and trying to carve out an audience for his fledgling podcast.
His most recent assignment is far from glamourous. He’s supposed to travel to a remote place in the middle of Chesapeake Bay known as Frick Island to cover a special event. But the truly riveting story about this small fishing village isn’t about cake or climate change at all. It’s about an unusual girl named Piper Parrish. As Anders stood there, slack-jawed and contemplative in the middle of the road, he thought how he had been to a lot of beach towns before. Small towns, even. But he had to admit, he’d never seen a town quite like this before.
Piper hasn’t always lived on Frick Island. She knows exactly what it feels like to be an outcast or a “Come Here.” Then she falls head over heels for Tom Parrish. He is the very center of her universe until the day when his boat doesn’t return. She can’t imagine a life without him – so she doesn’t.
She lives each day as if Tom’s still by her side. What’s astonishing is that the entire island follows right along with her. Somehow, everything seems to change with the arrival of the awkward and inquisitive Anders. He makes it okay for her to do more than to just exist in a state of endless sadness. And maybe, with his help she will even find the way back to love again. At least that was what he told himself, anyway. It was for Piper’s voice. It was for his podcast. It was not for how when she smiled, her dimples grew so deep it looked like Bill Gibbons had carved them himself with his whittling tool, or how when she got irritated her nose burned pink and she cried out “son of a monkey!” or “holy barnacles!” or once – when she dropped an industrial-size mayonnaise jar while taking inventory at the store and it splattered all over the freshly mopped floor – “Frank Sinatra!” or how when she looked at him with her big intelligent cow eyes, it somehow made his insides turn soft as bread dough. It had absolutely nothing to do with any of that.
The Invisible Husband of Frick Island is a perfect romance to kick off the summer of 2021! With her perceptive style and quirky characters, Colleen Oakley delivers a story that is profound on every level. She approaches such serious issues like climate change and grief with an awareness that somehow inspires hope. All the while, she surrounds you with the sights and smells of an island where the sense of real community shines like a siren. And it’s the kind of welcome harbor that you won’t soon forget…
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