We Begin at the End

Novelists use setting—mountains, valleys, islands—to suggest the emotional mood of the novel. Cape Haven is perched along a treacherous cliff. After decades of unchecked beach erosion, Cape Haven is falling into the Pacific Ocean: “Taped off a year back, the cliff was eroding, now and then people from California Wild came and measured and estimated. The cliffs had become a fact of Cape Haven” (6). The novel opens with a crowd of concerned townspeople surveying a collapsed home, the most recent evidence of the town’s slide into the ocean. The town’s future is grim—“Cape Haven did all it could do just to remain” (6). The cliffs create that mood of doomed prospects and apocalyptic anxieties.

Sissy Radley, whose death in a hit-and-run when she was only 7 centers the novel, is buried in a quiet cemetery overlooking the ocean, just a few feet from a cliff. When Walk wants to be alone, he walks along the cliff's edges, balancing against his periodic dizziness from his Parkinson’s medication. Duchess visits Sissy’s gravesite when she wants to be alone—she studies the jagged edges of the cliff. And Vincent’s leap from the same cliff will finally convince Duchess of her father’s heroism and love.