The protagonist is a sixteen year old girl Pell Davis, a child of privilege whose life has been anything but privileged. Although she lives in Newport with her socialite grandmother, attends an elite school, and faces a future of ease, hers has not been a happy life.  When she was six, her mother left the family; when she was ten, her beloved father, the rock of her life, died of brain cancer.  Now, the preternaturally mature Pell is on a mission: to reconnect with her mother whom she has not seen and all too rarely heard from for ten years.

Pell has been led by her grandmother to believe that her mother Lyra Nicholson Davis has been living a life of dissipation on the Isle of Capri.  But Pell believes that it is imperative that she recover the mother whom she largely remembers as a loving parent.  So she leaves her fourteen year old sister Lucy and her boyfriend Travis to fly to Italy.  She is disappointed that her mother does not meet her at the port of Sorrento; rather her friend Max has come to pick her up.  But when she arrives on the island, she rushes into her mother’s arms and recovers, at least a little, the feelings she remembers from her childhood.

Rice uses a very interesting writing technique.  She shifts between the first-person when describing Pell’s actions and reactions and the third person point of view of other characters, especially Lyra.  Pell discovers that her mother is very different from the person portrayed by her grandmother.  She is not a frivolous, pleasure loving socialite.  She lives is a relatively small house, works as a landscape designer, has a small, but devoted circle of friends.  At the center is neighbor Max Gardiner, a well-known playwright, whose wife, a renowned artist, had been Lyra’s best friend. Christina had suffered from Alzheimer’s and had died after a fall.  Pell discovers that Lyra had cared tenderly for her friend throughout her illness.

The essence of the story is Pell’s discovery of the truth about her mother’s reasons for fleeing her seemingly perfect life ten years earlier.  Why would a woman who was married to a wonderful man, who had two loving daughters, who had money and social position, flee to an island in Italy?  What was so awful about her life?

The Deep Blue Sea for Beginners describes the roots of one woman’s desperate descent into depression, the cost of the illness and her gradual recovery.  It also describes the price her daughters paid for her illness and her disappearance from their lives.  One does have tremendous sympathy for Lyra and admiration for her success in putting her life back together.  But, in retrospect, this reader wondered why, especially after their father’s death, she could not have reached out to her daughters, why it was left to Pell to reestablish some kind of connection.  To be honest, these questions detracted from my enjoyment of the book.

Rice introduces a number of secondary plots and characters.  There is the pain and problems of Max’s grandson, Rafe, who is a recovering addict and who was responsible for his grandmother’s accident and death.  Will he stay clean?  Will he forgive himself?  There is Pell’s sympathy for and attraction to Rafe.  Will she remain true to her paragon of a boyfriend?  There is Max’s growing love for Lyra.  Will she accept his feelings and does she return them?

The Deep Blue Sea for Beginners deals with some really, well, deep stuff.  Rice writes women’s fiction, not contemporary “serious” fiction with all its angsty suffering.  But I have to admit that, while I appreciate the happy endings for all her characters, I feel that life almost never works out quite this well.  I didn’t quite believe in the fairy tale. 

--Jean Mason