Reviews

The Cottages at the Cape – Margie’s Summer Getaway

The Cottages at the Cape
Kathy McWilliam
McWilloway Publishing (2025)
ISBN: 978-1069363701
Reviewed by Shawna Thompson for Reader Views (11/2025)
5*- Trouble, Tea, and Timmies
Margie, a recently widowed woman, is seeking solace on the coast of New Brunswick after the painful death of her husband. She retreats to a rented seaside cottage, hoping to escape the grief that has consumed her. A half-feral cat, a foul-mouthed new friend, and a circle of local misfits pull her into a rough but welcoming coastal community. When a violent man returns and a body turns up on the beach, the summer sanctuary becomes a powder keg.

The Cottages at the Cape: Margie’s Summer Getaway by Kathy McWilliam is told with sharp wit, honesty, and dark hilarity. It’s a story about grief and remaking a life, with your people beside you. This novel excels in character depth. Margie is a protagonist who is flawed and resilient. Phyllis, Absolom, Mary, Nestor, and Tanya round out the rich cast of characters. Each character is distinct in voice and motive, and even side characters like Scabby the cat have weight. They are really complicated people with pasts that bleed into the present.

The first half of the book is quiet, drawing readers into Margie’s inner life and the cottage life by the coast. It shifts into a darker, more suspenseful book with Frank’s violent intrusion. The slow
build-up makes the eventual chaos all the more believable and affecting. This novel never rushes, trusting readers to savor the small moments before delivering the climax.

What sets this book apart is the strength of the writing. Take this passage, for example:
“She breathed in the cool air of the cottage at morning and identified threads: timber and dust, loamy earth and sap smell. Salt tang from the shore. It was like counting blessings, this morning acknowledgement of the scents of her place, her sense of place. “(pg.4)
This is not just a description; it’s emotional, and it anchors the reader in Margie’s inner life as much as in the setting. The dialogue of her character crackles with regional authenticity.

The Cottages at the Cape: Margie’s Summer Getaway is best suited for readers who enjoy character-driven contemporary fiction and a touch of dark humor. Fans of Elizabeth Strout or Anne Tyler will appreciate Kathy McWilliam’s keen observation of ordinary lives under pressure. This novel will resonate strongly with adult and mature readers, particularly women navigating midlife transition and loss of a spouse.
With this novel, Kathy McWilliam proves she can write with humor, wisdom, and emotional depth. Future reads will no doubt follow her wherever she chooses to go. Maybe further along the East Coast or into entirely new terrain. It is a striking debut novel.

The Burin Girl

The Burin Girl
Kathy McWilliam
McWilloway Publishing (2025)
ISBN: 978-1069363718
Reviewed by Paul Knobloch for Reader Views (12/2025)
5*- Women at Work
In her fine new novel, The Burin Girl, author Kathy McWilliam delivers a narrative that digs deep into the daily life of a working-class woman, Johanna O’Shea. Johanna comes to Newfoundland and the O’Shea household to wed widower Henry O’Shea, who has been left with children and does not have the time to tend to them. He really needs to be manning a fishing boat to earn his pay, so Johanna arrives, eventually marries him, runs the household, and looks after
the children.

What The Burin Girl really does is explore how women use their ingenuity to create a sort of solidarity. The connection between mothers and daughters and other female friends is a vital part
of life for women living in this era. They come to understand the world by educating themselves and sharing through the oral tradition. It has been women, throughout the centuries, who have
identified which foods are edible and which will kill you, when to plant certain vegetables, how to make clothing, and most importantly, how to use plants as medicine. There is a poignant
moment after Johanna loses her second son, who dies at just two months old. She thinks of her mom and asks herself, “Her witch’s ways, I wonders, would they have saved him?”

….The working-class vernacular is spot-on, and again, the main theme is driven home: women need to work together, educate themselves, and forge a solidarity that makes it able for them to exist
in an especially tough climate (at a time when most homes probably had no electricity). The Burin Girl shows us, at nearly every juncture, that the patriarchy and its system offer little support for women like Johanna. Even the Reverend Father at church speaks in platitudes,
leaving Johanna feeling like she has nowhere to turn: “Reverend Father tells me nothin’ I can swallow down whole.”….

…..The truth here is not pretty. But The Burin Girl shows us how to survive when the odds are stacked against you, and by exploring the plight of working women in a turn-of-the-century Newfoundland fishing village, we see a world that is in some ways similar to that of Céline Sciamma’s brilliant film, Portrait of a Lady on Fire. Both are important works that highlight the reality of living in a patriarchal society, and somehow, finding in solidarity a means of making it
all work. The Burin Girl does exactly that.

Author Note: The reviewer, Paul Knobloch, erred in his interpretation when he states ‘Johanna comes to Newfoundland and the O’Shea household to wed Henry O’Shea’ – Johanna has, in fact, lived her entire life in Newfoundland, first on the Burin Peninsula and then in St. John’s on the Avalon Peninsula. Easy mistake when one is unfamiliar with Atlantic Canadian geography!