Tara Road, by Maeve Binchy

More “beach reading” (in my case, lake reading) from the Grand Rapids MN Public Library’s annual book sale at “Tall Timber Days.”  Ria has lead a seemingly happy life with husband, Danny, a successful real estate agent, and their two children, Annie and Brian, on Tara Road.  They have renovated a large Victorian house in a section of Dublin which is undergoing gentrification.  The book starts very slowly with various characters being introduced and the first half could have condensed into a much shorter section. Finally, by page 225, Ria and Danny are having dinner at a fine restaurant, where Ria hopes to bring up the topic of having another child, when Danny reveals that he is leaving Ria to live with his much younger, pregnant girlfriend.  Devastated and overwhelmed, Ria makes a snap decision to do a summer “house exchange” with an American woman who lives in Stoneyfield CT.  Marilyn Vine had contacted her, having remembered meeting Danny ten years earlier on a trip to Ireland, seeking his advice on finding someone interested in such an exchange.  Marilyn has her own sorrow as well.  The second half of the book is actually very good.  The two women find themselves thrust not only into a new life, but into the established one of their counterpart on the opposite side of the ocean.  Annie and Brian are torn between the lives they used to know and what their lives may become with a stepmother not much older than Annie and a new sibling on the way.  By the end of the novel, one really cares about all of the characters.  I particularly loved the hapless young Brian, always able to say the absolute wrong thing with the best of intentions, and the remarkably ugly dog, Pliers.  648 pp.