Set against the wall street crash of 1929 this was my first Anita Shreve. The story unfolds through the narrative of different charactors so you get all angles of the story as it moves along. The main charactor Honora was totally convincing.
The book was fast paced and drew the reader in.
A great book and I will read more by this author, probably Fortunes Rock which is based around the Woollen Mill featured in this book.
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I love Anita Shreve - her work is unique amongst novelists in that while I'm reading her books real time seems to stand still. I find myself so locked up in her made-up world that I lose sense of where I am and everything going on around me becomes muted white noise. I don't think another author has ever delivered that depth of escapism for me.
This book was a gift and I didn't expect to enjoy it as much as 'The Pilot's Wife' and some of Shreve's other books that I'd read and loved, but in fact it was superbly written and full of interest, especially the workers' rights aspect and the link of the house to the present day in her other works. She is a craftsman in her field - not to be mistaken with so many other novelists churning out period pap for the masses.
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At the centre of the story are Honora, bank clerk and Sexton, typewriter salesman who meet and marry at the start of the great depression. The love and hardship they face together is beautifully told by Anita Shreve in her very visual style. I am definitely becoming a fan of her work having now read four of her novels including this one.
The main characters all have chapters assigned to them throughout the novel so we can understand how the story progresses from their point of view. We are introduced in this way to McDermott, mill worker and Alphonse the young boy he has chosen to protect, Vivian, wealthy socialite an unlikely group but whose stories all link and merge. There are also a few chapters written as letters from Honora's mother Alice that helps to link the background information together.
Set in New Hampshire during the troubled years of 1929/30, Sea Glass is about the coming together of a motley collection of people in troubled times. It was a strange time for them all as although the strikes and Wall Street crash were affecting them all they were happy that summer of 1930, in their innocence not knowing how disastrously it would all end. As the reader I certainly had no inkling of how things were going to turn out, for me the sign of a well told story. A heartbreaking and vividly descriptive insight into the far reaching consequences of The Wall Street crash and the mill strikes.
I also found absolutely fascinating the descriptions of Sea Glass, those colourful shards of glass smoothed by the sea that one sometimes comes across on beaches. Anita Shreve cleverly uses Honora's collection of these shards as a link throughout.
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Shreve writes elegant and restrained prose, but under the surface, there are deep emotions at work. The story line sounds like a plot from one of those genre novels beloved by little old ladies who take them out from libraries in little wheeled trollies - you know the type, they have a cover picture of a girl in a shawl with her arms crossed, and she's called Maggie, or Sarah, or Nelly, and she fights through hard times to attract the son of the mill owner ...
This is the antithesis of one of those books. The characterisation is subtle, and finely drawn. The plot moves gently but inexorably through peaks and troughs. The interlacing stories meld naturally together, and for readers of her previous novels, returning to Fortune's Rocks feels like returning to a favourite place - although one that changes, and isn't frozen in time.
I also felt I learned a lot about manufacturing in New England at the time. It seems cotton didn't only tyrannise the South.
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If you only read one Anita Shreve book, make it this one - and then you'll make time to read many more!
Beautiful descriptions and characterisations draw the reader into the lives of the characters. Shreve is especially good at describing her unlikeable characters as sympathetically as the likeable, so that their situations become fascinating and it is impossible to put the book down. The melancholy beauty of the setting and the nostalgic of the period all add to the enjoyment.
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