Sea Glass by Anita Shreve
10/10
I think this is a perfect modern novel. I don't think I can class it as a great book. It isn't a Dickens. Nor is it a Wolf Hall. But it was a perfect read.
Each chapter was based around one of the 5 or 6 key characters as they moved through the unfolding story. Anita Shreve is very good at providing a quiet, understated backdrop, rich in detail, for the drama that emerges, sometimes shockingly. She is also good at giving a feel for an era.
Here we are taken to America, just as the depression of the 1930s is beginning, but our characters don't know that. People wonder about their futures; people can't imagine their futures; people take risks; people have hope, or worries. And then the market crashes.
It is about relationships, love, the gulf between classes in America. It is also about Marxist politics and state collusion with capitalist industrialists.
And, most importantly, it is about finding value and beauty in pieces of old glass flung up amongst the detritus on a beach.
I like it that Anita Shreve's novels are all linked to each other, often through a particular house on this particular beach, at different points in its history.
Well satisfied.
But now I must read a book by a male author, as I am trying to do girl-boy-girl-boy!
10/10
I think this is a perfect modern novel. I don't think I can class it as a great book. It isn't a Dickens. Nor is it a Wolf Hall. But it was a perfect read.
Each chapter was based around one of the 5 or 6 key characters as they moved through the unfolding story. Anita Shreve is very good at providing a quiet, understated backdrop, rich in detail, for the drama that emerges, sometimes shockingly. She is also good at giving a feel for an era.
Here we are taken to America, just as the depression of the 1930s is beginning, but our characters don't know that. People wonder about their futures; people can't imagine their futures; people take risks; people have hope, or worries. And then the market crashes.
It is about relationships, love, the gulf between classes in America. It is also about Marxist politics and state collusion with capitalist industrialists.
And, most importantly, it is about finding value and beauty in pieces of old glass flung up amongst the detritus on a beach.
I like it that Anita Shreve's novels are all linked to each other, often through a particular house on this particular beach, at different points in its history.
Well satisfied.
But now I must read a book by a male author, as I am trying to do girl-boy-girl-boy!
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