COAST ROAD

Yet another career-obsessed man comes to his senses and discovers his softer side with the woman he loves. Jack McGill is a high-powered architect who’s abandoned his creative self for the big bucks (that is, sold out) and is designing casinos and resorts instead of the homes he—d always dreamed of. In the transformation from struggling artist to man-of-the-hour, he’s lost his wife, the painter Rachel Keats, and their two daughters, 15-year-old Samantha and 13-year-old Hope. Mother and daughters have moved to Big Sur for the quiet life’s rewards. Meanwhile, back in San Francisco, Jack spends any free time he’s got with his polished but somehow lackluster girlfriend Jill. In due course, Jack receives a wee-hours phone call and learns that Rachel’s been hit in a car accident; she was driving to her book club in Carmel when an elderly woman accidentally edged her off the road. Not quite sure why he’s doing it, Jack hauls himself off to Big Sur, leaving behind his angry business partner, several big-money projects, and the long-suffering Jill. Rachel’s in a coma; Samantha and Hope—lost in the baffling throes of adolescence—are desperate for love and yet also suspicious and resentful of the father who disappeared so long ago. As Rachel lies unconscious in the hospital, Jack, Samantha, and Hope—with the support of Rachel’s new friends, the members of her book group—struggle to become the family they always should have been. Hard-core Delinsky fans (A Woman’s Place, 1997, etc.) will be satisfied here. But newcomers won’t beg for more: Samantha and Hope provide much-needed angst and humor, but Jack and Rachel’s relationship, pre- and post-coma, is so predictable that it’s hard to care.