Tourist Season

The novel’s Cape Carnage backdrop offers the protagonist, Harper Starling, the illusion of change, growth, and personal choice. After Harper escapes her kidnapper, Harvey Mead, she flees her old life, adopts a stolen identity, and relocates to a small coastal town in Maine. She does everything in her power to disassociate from her past life and identity out of self-preservation. The facade she is hiding behind is her “first line of defense” against “the past that trails behind” her (35). Harper has chosen this new life in Carnage in hopes of transcending her dark personal history. Harper lost her parents when she was a child; then she and her boyfriend, Adam, were kidnapped years later, and Adam was murdered. Harper is tired of identifying with these painful experiences and is desperate for her new small-town life to liberate her through the opportunity to reinvent herself. However, the novel uses her example to illustrate how the reinvention of oneself cannot truly happen until one deals with the effects of the past.  

The narrative uses its Cape Carnage setting as a