If Patrick Byrne had known his death was all it would have taken to get his estranged children; Mairé, Erin, Ella, and Paddy in the same room twice in one month, he would have been happy to kick a lot sooner (but not really — he never wanted to leave a party). While Patrick’s second wife, Vivian, was making a play for his entire estate, including the South Haven summer home that called to mind the compounds of Hyannis and Kennebunkport, Mairé received a disturbing message from the grave — a message she must figure out how to share with her siblings though they were barely speaking.

When their mother Grace, fabulously successful in her own right, divorced their father after twenty-five years of marriage, Patrick purchased South Haven hoping summer holidays and lakeside togetherness might inoculate his children from the same destructive patterns of heredity that had plagued their mother’s family for generations.

It worked, and South Haven became the siblings’ touchstone — the place they were their closest and very best selves until their mother weaponized a thirty-year-old secret that flipped the family on its head. One sister stopped speaking to another, the favored child was shunned, alliances were shored up, and dysfunction began eroding the Byrne family the way the crashing waves of Lake Michigan had been eroding the bluff on which the summer estate had sat for centuries.

When Grace learned her ex, Patrick, the true love of her life, was terminal, she suffered a small stroke, then a massive one soon after he died. Perhaps with Grace unable to control her children’s affections for one another, Mairé can restore harmony amongst her siblings and bring them back to the place where they were their very best selves.

At its core, South Haven is a heart-wrenching sibling love story masqueraded as a cautionary tale about the psychology of generational trauma and toxic patterns of heredity. While both funny and dark, it illuminates the deep, biological urge to cling to one’s family despite its flaws and find forgiveness, if not companionable peace.