Love and longing are at the heart of Return to Willow Lake, the ninth installment in Susan Wigg's Lakeshore Chronicles series. This time, the main character is Sonnet Romano, a bright, biracial overachiever who appears to have everything going for her. She is the director of UNESCO, has been awarded a prestigious fellowship which would send her to work overseas and has the ideal beau--a West Point graduate who runs her father's high-stakes Congressional campaign.
When Sonnet leaves Manhattan to attend a family wedding in her old hometown of Avalon, on the shores of Willow Lakes in the Catskill Mountains in New York State, her "perfect" life is suddenly called into question. She bumps into Zach Alger, a childhood friend who once had "goofy ears and braces on his teeth," now charming and dashing and "as familiar as an old favorite song coming on the radio." When the two have a tryst after the wedding, Sonnet's whole world is tilted on its axis; things get even more complicated when Sonnet learns that her mother is pregnant and has also been diagnosed with cancer. This leaves Sonnet to make some very hard choices about life and love and the real meaning of family and home.
Wiggs has written another emotionally resonant, complex novel that is briskly paced and populated with fully fleshed-out characters. --Kathleen Gerard, blogger at Reading Between the Lines