The telling of this story is through the thoughts of a mother and her two high school daughters as their husband/father goes through the last stages of a brain tumor. The setting is a small island on the New Jersey shore where the family runs a tourist rental business. I quickly came to the understanding that the author has a personal understanding of loss due to disease and the ability to communicate it in a real life way through her characters. Katie Runde's created her first novel with tenderness against the backdrop of a somnolent summer at the beach.