Short and easy read. The end was interesting, but the overall story was no so.

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Sam and Hadley West are a couple just trying to survive the soul-shattering loss of their only son in Alaska. They each decide to do this in their own ways: For Sam, a sports journalist, acceptance of his son's death means undertaking an arduous trek by dogsled across the beautiful but forbidding Alaskan landscape to find the spot where Paul died. For Hadley, it means renting a benignly haunted, salt-soaked cottage off the coast of Maine where she can paint and begin to grieve in peace.

Now, at opposite ends of the country, waiting for their divorce to be finalized, they begin to exchange letters through the post - missives filled with longing and truths they have never before voiced. They recall their marriage - its magic moments and its challenges - and begin to rediscover the reasons why they fell in love in the first place.

As Sam risks his life to reach the remote crash site, Hadley begins an equally hazardous inner journey to rendezvous with the mad grief of a mother's heart. At the place where all else is lost, they will meet again.

This is the first time that I read this book, although I did read, and enjoy, The Perfect Summer by Luanne Rice sometime last year. I always enjoy books about family dynamics and give this book an A+! I would definitely recommend it to others.

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From Publishers Weekly
The bestselling Rice teams up with Monninger in this epistolary novel of an unraveling marriage. Sam and Hadley West separated following the death of their grown son, Paul. Sam is in Laika Star, Alaska, where he is arranging to travel via dog sled to the site where Paul died in a plane crash. Hadley, meanwhile, has moved to an island off the coast of Maine and thinks Sam's trip is a bad idea. Both Sam and Hadley initially come off as unsympathetic (he too self-centered, she too bitter and jaded), but as the letters pile up and they delve deeper into their anguish while sorting out what [their] marriage means or how it should end, they endear themselves to the reader. The book is unabashedly melodramatic, but readers into the sappy will be reaching for a Kleenex by the end. (Oct.)
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The letters written by the husband and wife and how they shared their grief carried the story along. They each came to resolution with how to handle their tremendous loss.

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