The "fish out of water" story has a reliably entertaining subcategory: the story about city folks who must survive without their creature comforts. With her first novel, Pete and Alice in Maine, Caitlin Shetterly finds the humor in her transplanted New Yorkers' disorientation and gracefully weaves such moments into another classic story line: a marriage is in trouble.
It's the early days of Covid, and Alice, an at-home mom who has let her writerly aspirations languish, and Pete, her finance-guy husband, decide to leave Manhattan with their two daughters for their second home in Maine. ("Our privilege is clear, almost criminal," Alice admits.) Alice has a reason for fleeing the city with her family beyond a desire to elude the virus: in New York is the woman with whom Pete has been having an affair.
Shetterly (Made for You and Me) occasionally hands the narrative reins to Pete or one of the kids, but this is the plucky, if coddled, Alice's story. Her chapters read almost like journal entries in which she recounts her days in Maine, rehashes memories of happier (and unhappier) times with Pete, and ruminates over what's become of her life. "This isn't a Stephen King novel," Pete reminds Alice, who's frightened by the locals' vocal concern that she and her family have brought the virus with them. But like a Stephen King novel, Pete and Alice in Maine pays homage to the visual splendor of the Pine Tree State and its proud, distinctively accented citizens. --Nell Beram, author and freelance writer