In COAST ROAD Barbara Delinsky explores what happens when a marriage gets an unexpected into a coma after a serious car accident near her home in Big Sur. After hearing the terrible news, Rachel's distraught ex-husband Jack McGill abandons his girlfriend and the business he loves to help mend his broken family.

Jack works to make up the six years he lost with his girls since the divorce.  While battling his own selfishness, Jack works double time to win back the respect and love of his daughters. Prior to the divorce, he had been too busy building his architectural firm to share special family memories like their birthdays.  This lack of attention was one of the reasons Rachel left him and San Francisco for the peace and beauty of Big Sur.

While in Big Sur, Jack also spends a lot of time begging, wishing and demanding that his wife ---note the missing "ex" --- wake up.  When she does not, he begins to examine his own life.  Finally slowing the intense pace which governed his San Francisco world, Jack looks inward and what he discovers there shames him.  Once he begins to realize what went wrong with his marriage and his life, Jack becomes an admirable --- though at times bumbling --- father and (ex) husband, alternately taking his older daughter shopping for her prom dress and spending his nights smoothing cream on his wife's legs.  

He is falling in love again and he knows it.  After breaking up with his girlfriend of two years, Jack is determined to win Rachel back --- even though she is in a coma.  He goes as far as to slip her wedding band back on her finger, a bit presumptuous an act considering she has no choice but to submit. Ironically this same lack of communication --- and one-sided conversation --- was one of the issues that led to their divorce.  It is here where you realize that Rachel's side of the story is missing.  She does not have a voice, instead the only way her side can be revealed is through other people's memories:  her ex-husband's, her best friend's, and her daughters'.  

So when things wrap up a little too neatly and quickly at the end, you are left wondering about Rachel's story.  Jack places the ring back on her finger, he finishes her paintings, but what does she do?  Rachel sleeps while her life changes; her children fall back in love with their father and their father falls back in love with her.  But we never see Rachel fall in love at all --- either she is a quick study or she never fell out of love from six years before.  Either way, something is missing in this novel about recaptured love.

   --- Reviewed by Dana H. Schwartz

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