Blais makes no bones about how unhappy she is about her expulsion from the family’s summer Eden, but she is well aware of the dangers of writing what could come across as a 'Lament of the One Percent' ... The book’s snappy tone is exemplified by Blais’s wry comparison of her husband’s old WASP family with her own Irish American background ... A self-declared archivist, Blais relies heavily — sometimes too heavily — on external documents for her portrait of the Vineyard ... To the New Owners sparkles when Blais focuses on her family’s frequently funny experiences instead of trying to capture Martha’s Vineyard with an island tour and a rundown of its offseason activities.
Most of the familiar places and names from standard Martha's Vineyard books are here in these pages as well: Peter Benchley and Jaws, visiting Clintons, Carly Simon, Walter Cronkite and the rest. The chapter on formidable Vineyard doyenne and Washington Post publisher Katherine Graham is the most charming in the book, positively luminous with nostalgic affection. And the broader canvas of Vineyard life – the shops, the storms, the wry local humor – is painted with exactly the kind of skill and evocation readers would expect from the author of the bestselling In These Girls, Hope is a Muscle.
Madeleine Blais has written a strange book. In part it’s a tour of the island’s faux-casual charms, and as such it’s threaded with mindless chitchat of the sort you find in the TripAdvisor comments section ... Most notably, perhaps, as its title hints, To the New Owners is a steaming load dropped on the author’s former doorstep, a book-length act of revenge, a cleat-hitch slap that will reverberate up and down the Eastern coastline ... Everyone feels possessive and sentimental about the houses they occupy, even summer rentals. But Blais squanders what sympathy we might have, the way those noisy spinning extractors force the water out of swimsuits.
Readers who would dismiss this as a First World problem should probably find another book. Those who abhor name dropping should find another island. But for anyone who has ever been curious about life on the Vineyard, or fantasized about settling in, Blais offers a diverting portrait ... Her portrait of her late father-in-law [Kennedy administration lawyer Nicholas deBelleville Katzenbach] is perhaps the most engaging part of the book ... Throughout, Blais exhibits a veteran reporter’s instinct for even-handedness. She resists turning her beloved island into a gauzy paradise.
[Blais] gives a familial face to the mystique of Martha's Vineyard in this unfailingly charming reminiscence of summers spent on the island ... A great strength of the book are the author’s portraits of her mother-in-law, the formidable Lydia, writer Phil Caputo, and publisher Katharine Graham, the latter sketch sounding a dirge on the decline of newspapers ... The book has the flavor of a finely observed travel book, with Blais offering a brief history of the island and a thorough inventory of its hierarchy, traditions, and manifest (sometimes eccentric) pleasures. In her hands, it is an endearingly quaint community, though not without a tinge of snob appeal, which she gamely dissects. If not quite as funny as billed, there remains much gentle humor and a certain elegiac sweetness that more than compensates—that, and a touching coda.
Blais beautifully documents summers shared with family and friends enjoying unhurried days spent reading, visiting the quirky island towns, and basking in the natural environment. Blais weaves in a history of the island and its famous personages, its beauty, and its tourism-dependent economy ... Blais has written a bittersweet account of a wonderfully unplugged summer life.
