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    The From-Aways: A Novel
    The From-Aways: A Novel
    The From-Aways: A Novel
    Ebook382 pages5 hours

    The From-Aways: A Novel

    By CJ Hauser

    3.5/5

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    About this ebook

    Fresh talent CJ Hauser makes her literary debut with The From-Aways, an irreverent story of family, love, friendship, and lobsters, in the tradition of J. Courtney Sullivan’s Maine and Richard Russo’s Empire Falls.

    Two women come to Maine in search of family, and find more love, heartbreak, and friendship, than they’d ever imagined one little fishing town could hold.

    When Leah, a young New York reporter, meets Henry, she falls in love with everything about him: his freckles, green thumb, and tales of a Maine childhood. They marry quickly and Leah convinces Henry to move back to Menamon. As Leah builds a life there, reporting for The Menamon Star and vowing to be less of an emotional screw-up, the newlyweds are shocked to discover that they don’t know each other nearly so well as they thought they did.

    When Quinn’s mother dies, she tracks down the famous folk-singer father she’s never known, in Menamon. Scrappy and smart-mouthed, Quinn gets a job at the local paper, an apartment above the town diner, and tries to shore up the courage to meet her father. But falling in love with her roommate, Rosie, was never part of the plan.

    These two unruly women’s work relationship at The Star deepens into best-friendship when they stumble onto a story that shakes sleepy Menamon—and holds damaging repercussions for Leah’s husband and Quinn’s roommate both. As the town descends into turmoil, both women must decide what kind of lives they are willing to fight for.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Road Integrated Media
    Release dateMay 20, 2014
    ISBN9780062310767
    The From-Aways: A Novel

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    Reviews for The From-Aways

    3.5/5

    37 ratings12 reviews

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    • 5/5
      A literary read with two alternating viewpoints and different voices. In Menamon, Maine we find a newlywed couple, one a native to Menamon and one from NY, a young gay woman moved there to be near her absent father, and assorted other locals. The small local newspaper hires both of the females, neither a native, making a staff of 3. The problem is that wealthy people "from away", and the two recent additions to the newspaper staff, also "from-aways", are at odds over the wealthy couple's enormous new house. Their new property encompasses a historic carousel and park that residents of the town don't want to lose. The new owners plan to destroy it. The newlyweds, Leah and Henry, are at odds, quietly, because he is doing landscaping for the new owners and she is helping report what is wrong with the purchase of the land, thereby jeopardizing his job. There's more at stake for the little town and for each person and their relationships.

      Characters in the book are all over the place and charming, and real. Details are exquisite. If you enjoy literary work, don't miss this book.

    • 5/5
      Menamon, Maine didn’t know what it was in for when Henry’s wife, Leah, convinced him to leave his landscaping job in New York and move home. It didn’t expect Carter Marks only daughter to come in search of the father she’d not known. It didn’t expect a lot of things, but they happened anyway.Leah had fallen in love with Henry at their first meeting. He was all she had ever wanted, strong, funny and totally different person than she had ever known. They didn’t wait to get married and then Leah began the process of getting him home because his tales of Maine were so wonderful.Quinn had nursed her mother through cancer, mental issues and grew up in a two person home. They made do, but it was never anything elaborate. Mom refused to ask the man who fathered Quinn for anything so that is exactly what she got. After paying off the funeral, there wasn‘t much left so Quinn decided to launch off to Maine in search of dad.They come together at the Menamon Star, the local “paper” run by Henry’s sister. Quinn writer of obits becomes 2nd in charge and Leah, having written many, many articles for a much bigger paper becomes basically the runner, which she resents.This debut novel is so full of life and quirks that you won’t want to leave. How Leah, Quinn and others make Menamon home will wrap you up and have you wanting everything to turn out all right. But, of course, it may not.
    • 3/5
      I try to put a lot of thought into the books I choose for my summer book club to read and discuss. After all, the group is made up of smart and thoughtful women so when I find a book that not only seems interesting but potentially addresses an issue that is close to our own experiences as summer people in a small waterfront town, I am eager to add it to our list. C. J. Hauser's novel The From-Aways, although set in coastal Maine instead of the Great Lakes Midwest, seemed to fit the bill almost perfectly. The book turned out to be as much, if not more so, an examination of relationships and the truths and negotiations within those relationships as it is a conflict between locals and wealthy summer folk buying up beachfront property and changing the tenor of the town though, a bit different than I had wanted or expected. Leah is an outsider new to the small lobster fishing town of Menamon. She met and married her husband Henry in New York City but she was mesmerized by his romantic tales of growing up in the tightly knit community of Menamon. So as soon as it was feasible, she convinced him to move back to the idyllic town of his childhood. Only that idyll might never have been real. Quinn is the other newcomer to town, there looking for her father, a quasi-famous folk singer who abandoned her and her mother when she was just an infant. She's really only there to find Carter because it was her mother's dying wish that she do so. Leah and Quinn meet each other in the offices of the town's only newspaper where Leah is hoping to resume her journalist's career and Quinn is working as the only reporter. The two of them become friends and partners, especially when the townspeople wake to the implications of all the new development going on around them. Leah desperately wants to be accepted by the locals, even if it means lining up on opposite sides of the development issue from her new husband. Quinn is less interested in belonging to the town, especially if it means embracing something that her father is heading, but her roommate and girlfriend Rosie has strong opinions and Quinn wants to support her. As Leah and Quinn start researching the background, they come up with some information that, if exposed, will certainly help the locals' protest and perhaps keep the privately owned park and carousel available to everyone but it could cost Leah her marriage as surely as it will cost Henry's job. The grassroots protest backgrounds Leah and Henry's relationship. Henry is one of the town's own but he doesn't have the idealized and romanticized view of the past that Leah has built up in her mind. He asks her to consider whether change can really be inherently bad as she seems to have decided and cautions her that change of one sort or another is guaranteed to happen no matter what. But bigger than their divide over the development of the town, is their inability to understand each other. They don't communicate and so they can't compromise or be open and truthful enough about what is driving each of them to have a mature dialogue. The characters in this novel are all desperately young and shockingly immature. They are very self-focused, even in their relationships, and unable to make measured decisions. Instead, there's a lot of secrecy and thoughtlessness that made it hard to like the characters much. When Leah doesn't call her husband to tell him she's not coming home that night, she seems surprised that he would be upset and worried about her the next morning; she apologizes and promptly does the same thing again. Henry himself is barely fleshed out as a character so his continued forgiveness of Leah is not understandable at all. The conceit of Leah and Quinn as Woodward and Bernstein seemed almost like a game, children playing at being adults, rather than a legitimate comparison as they go haphazardly investigating the back room deals that led to the growing mega mansion dominating the shoreline. And while Quinn and Rosie's relationship is new and fragile and important to the storyline over all, the detailed sex scene between them really added nothing to the plot and could have been left out. The chapters alternate between Leah and Quinn's points of view and while their voices start out as very different, they start to take on a few too many similarities. Hauser has done a good job capturing small town Maine, the challenges to remain vital, and the population of the old timers who live there. The frustrations and dilemmas of a place that is going to have to blend tourism and its fishing past in order to survive are interesting for sure but ultimately the characters here didn't hold their own in the story.
    • 5/5
      The From-Aways centers on a small Maine town threatened by non. Locals -the from aways -planning on building a humongous housing compound. While that is the main plot of the novel there are so many other subplots dealing with family relationships.,professional relationships and maintaining a young marriage when both parties are on opposite fences on the housing issue. This is a wonderful read skillfully told that you can't help cheering for the townspeople fiercly dedicated to keeping their town the way it's always been
    • 4/5
      The story of two young women, the From-Aways, who separately move to Menamon, Maine and find themselves involved in the small town's fight against the rich out-of-towners who have purchased multiple lots and are building an estate on the town's scenic coast.But it's more than that plot. These are two young women who are still finding themselves.Leah, a newlywed, fell in love with the stories her husband, Henry, told about his hometown, Menamon.Quinn, a girl raised by a single mother, comes to Menamon to find fulfill a promise to her dying mother.The two get themselves hired at the local newspaper and begin to work together like a Woodward and Bernstein team.The writing is well-paced. The characters come to life. Leah finds herself wondering who her husband really is. Are his childhood memories about Menamon accurate? Quinn finds herself falling in love with her roommate and reluctantly getting to know her biological father, Carter, who is a town celebrity thanks to his one hit folk song. That song was about Quinn's mother.The story moves along, sometimes slowing for Leah's or Quinn's internal monologues.Chapters alternate narration between the two women and sometimes cause the reader to pause to determine which character is telling the story.
    • 5/5
      The From-Aways: A Novel by CJ Hauser is a great story, and the author is a wonderful story teller. There are so many people tp fall in love with in this story. Menamon, Maine is a small lobster fishing town on the coast of Maine. It's a small sleepy town where the big news is often something like the Red Tide, or a story on Johnny Deep, who runs the fish market.Never underestimate the currents, the deep and strong currents that run through any small town, and Menamon is no different from other small towns in that way. They currents might be small, but some of them are mighty strong, and these are the ones that take the residents. old and new, by surprise.Leah is a New York journalist who meets Henry and after a short time they leave New York, where they met, and the move back to Henry's family home in Menamon. Henry's sister Charley runs the small local newspaper there. It's there, after finding work on this small time paper that Leah meets Quinn.Quinn herself is a recent transplant to the town. She ended up there while trying to find her father, who had left many years before, leaving Quinn with no memories, but a few dreams of memories. He lives, she has learned in Menamon. It's while looking for a place to live that Quinn meets Rosy, a younger girl who is looking for a roommate, and suddenly Quinn finds herself with a place to live, a job on the local paper and in the process, she may have met the love of her life.I think that it will be a long time before I forget these characters, their lives, the good parts and the bad. I suspect that I will want to revisit them with a reread someday, because I have only just closed the book on and ending that I never saw coming, and I miss them already. Every. Single. One.
    • 4/5
      I received this book as an advanced copy. It a story of family, friendships, love, and loss. The storyline was good, but it has one too many f-bombs, so if you can get past that, it a decent summer read!
    • 5/5
      Stunning.This book goes through you like a salty, summer wind, whipping off the coast. A story about how a town and a people can become your family, from-away or not. I've already been fighting the urge to move back to New England and this book fanned the flame, desrcibing - perhaps unwittingly - the wonder, charm, and love there is to experience in smalltown Maine.
    • 4/5
      This is story of two young women coming to terms with their lives and decisions made. It is set in the town of Menamon, Maine and the town itself is one of the most important characters in the story and a place I'd like to know more about including the people that live there. I gave this book 3 and a half stars because while it is uneven, it is not predictable and there are some excellent moments.
    • 3/5
      A Library Thing free ARC to read for review. I really enjoyed the setting which is in Maine. It's the story of two women trying to find themselves in a new town. A good beach read for the summer.
    • 3/5
      In C.J. Hauser's debut novel The From-Aways, a pair of young women find their fate in a sleepy Maine town that offers them a fair share of hope and heartbreak. Leah is eager to give up her New York journalism dreams to marry Henry and move to his home town of Menamon,but despite finding some solace in her work as a local reporter, she begins to doubt the speed in which she entered the married state.Meanwhile,Quinn arrives in Menamon to meet her folk singer father for the first time and as she crosses paths with Leah via the newspaper office where they both work, each woman winds up influencing the other to the point where their carefully arranged lives are prone to unravel at the slightest touch.An engaging read that should find it's way onto many book club lists.
    • 1/5
      This could have been a good book if it had better language and a little less graphic display of affection between women characters. It was a struggle to get through this story as it was very boring reading some of the drivel that was supposed to make this a good book. I received this book through LibraryThing and do NOT recommend it.

    Book preview

    The From-Aways - CJ Hauser

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