The name is familiar, but the style is distinct in her debut novel.

Islander Mary Guterson’s debut novel, “We Are All Fine Here” could have read like one of those annual family newsletters you likely found tucked in a card this holiday season.

Her short tale of a year-in-the-life of a typical family is written from the point of view of a middle-aged, suburban mom living a normal, comfortable existence.

But unlike those family updates, her story cuts to the truth.

Guterson drops the upbeat façade, the obligatory references to gardening, kitchen remodels, a child’s report card, the husband’s promotion.

Instead, her protagonist Julia confesses that her husband’s a dud in bed and that she hates her job. She expresses more concern over her teenage son’s growing detachment than the pot clouds drifting from under his bedroom door.

And her announcement of a baby-to-be comes with strong doubts that her husband is the father.

“There’s nothing lower than sleeping with a man who is not your husband. I know this. I know I haven’t got any good excuses for my behavior. I can’t even use the lousy-husband defense, because in truth, my husband isn’t all that lousy,” Guterson’s Julia says before declaring a break from the truth-skewing tendencies learned from her mother.

“As my mother, the revisionist, used to write me at summer camp: We are all fine and hope to hear the same from you.”

But beneath the surface, little is fine in Julia’s life, evoking a fictional tell-all that one literary critic described as both “shocking” and “sad,” as well as “irritating” and “moving.”

Set for a hometown launch at Eagle Harbor Book Co. on Jan. 13, the 183-page novel netted Guterson, formerly a speech and language pathologist at Bainbridge High School, a six-figure advance from Putnam and world-wide distribution from publishers in France, the Netherlands, Italy and Japan.

Like her older brother David Guterson, author of the best-selling “Snow Falling On Cedars,” Mary Guterson’s work has been met with critical praise, including favorable write-ups in Publishers Weekly and the Library Journal.

But it’s comments like “shocking,” drawn from a mixed evaluation in the Kirkus Review, that Guterson “gets the biggest kick” out of.

“If any woman my age reads this book they’ll see nothing shocking in it,” the 47-year-old said. “It’s not shocking to have these thoughts, to have these experiences. But some may find it shocking that somebody’s actually talking about them.”

For Guterson, shock is a better response than universal approval.

“I’d hate to write a book that everybody likes,” she said. “That book would be so bland.”

While there are some similarities between her life and Julia’s, Guterson stresses that the book is a work of pure fiction.

She does admit, however, that the novel’s premise germinated from a real-life experience. Catching sight of an old flame at a friend’s wedding led Guterson to write a few lines about what would happen if a married woman was obsessed with a lover from long ago.

“Who doesn’t have an old boyfriend or girlfriend lurking in the recesses of their memory?” she asks.

Guterson has written short stories and freelance articles, but has long put writing a novel on the backburner.

With degrees in communication disorders and speech pathology from the University of Washington, the Seattle-native worked in New York City and Bremerton public schools and was the assistant editor of “Venture,” a business magazine.

Drawn to the island after frequent trips to visit her brother, Guterson, her husband, Rob Crichton, and her two children moved to Bainbridge in 1991.

Guterson was still working at the high school when she began writing “We Are All Fine Here” in 2001.

A self-described procrastinator, she began a series of rituals to motivate her writing. She arranged to email weekly progress re­ports to a friend while a writer pal met Guterson each Friday at the Bainbridge library for parallel laptop sessions.

“It’s like I had a dentist or doctor’s appointment, but this was a writing appointment,” she said.

She avoided the temptation of enlisting the aid of her famous brother, who never once looked at her developing manuscript.

“I’m so happy for my brother’s accomplishments,” she said. “But I’m a completely different person. You can see that in how different we write.”

The differences are immediately apparent. Where David’s writing is earnest and lyrical, Mary is often sarcastic and blunt, crafting lines that read like the spoken word.

“I write from rhythm,” she said. “Every sentence had to have a rhythmic flow that, in the end, I wanted to sound natural. It may seem off-the-cuff, but it took some work to get it that way.”

After two years of writing, much of it spent in a corner of the library’s autobiography section, Guterson was “totally shocked” when her novel drew multiple bids from some of the nation’s largest publishers.

She will begin a Northwest and East Coast bookstore tour after her appearance at Eagle Harbor Books. Guterson said she’s a bit nervous about taking the spotlight, expressing a hopefulness that her public appearances will be blessed with cool nerves and “good hair days.”

“I’m so happy to be writing full-time now,” she said. “I’ll be surprised when I see the book on a library shelf for the first time, just like I’ll get a big kick when I see it for sale at a book store.

“But what I’m really looking forward to is glancing over at someone at a cafe one day and seeing them actually reading my book.”