I really struggled with this. There are so many signifiers of things that I love--ornery old men, literature, quaint seaside towns--but while there is some charm to it I found almost the entire book to be mawkish and pandering. I'm going to interrogate my own reactions in the next couple of days, though, because God knows I've loved some mawkish and pandering shit in my life.

I suspect it has something to do with the writing. A lot of the dialogue functions only as a delivery vehicle for exposition, and the prose just lies there on the page and expects literary references to act as substance. I like intertextuality as much as the next pomo nerd but this is kind of like that one person who mistakes their ability to quote The Simpsons with having an actual sense of humor, to paraphrase NPR's Linda Holmes.