Moon Tide

April 28, 2003
The Great New England Hurricane of 1938 looms over this ponderous, overwritten debut novel, set in Westport Point, a small fishing town and summer resort on the Massachusetts coast. Tracing the lives of three women over a period of 30 years, Tripp sets their stories in a tangle of reverie and natural lore. Elizabeth Lowe, eccentric widow of a Harvard zoologist, has lived in the town for decades. Elderly now, she spends her time compiling lists of the village dead, reading from her large library and dreaming of the past. Her granddaughter Eve, introverted and reclusive since finding her mother's body after she committed suicide, visits the town in the summers, gravitating toward Jake, a local boy and laborer, from the time she is six years old. Elizabeth's servant, Maggie—dark-skinned, foreign and gifted in the herbal arts—lives out back in the root cellar and exercises a mysterious power over the men in the village. Her affair with a rum smuggler and Eve's ill-fated marriage to an architect provide the novel's romantic tension. The story is told in a patchwork of voices, mostly from the perspective of the three women and the men whose lives they touch, but also from the point of view of various secondary characters and even the hurricane itself. Though intermittently lyrical, Tripp's breathy prose all too often descends into garbled metaphor ("he has eaten the pages of the books he reads"; "she had been a capsized spirit—not meant for the soft-boiled life of the city"). The wealth of sensory detail cannot make up for the stagnant plot, which moves at a snail's pace and renders the storm almost anticlimactic. Agent, Bill Clegg. New England author tour.

April 15, 2003
"The storm had come on a moon tide." So begins the gripping climax of this densely written first novel. The storm in question is the destructive New England hurricane of 1938, and its formation is given an unforgettable description as beautiful as any poem. The story itself is slow and carefully paced, coming alive mainly in the last quarter of the book. Along the way, there are brilliant characterizations of Irish grandmother Elizabeth; her lost-poet son, Charles; loyal, mystical Central American maid Maggie; Eve, the silent, outsider granddaughter; townie Jake, quietly in love with Eve since he first glimpsed her as a child running breathless down a hill; Eve's cold husband, Patrick; taciturn, steady fisherman Blackwood, Maggie's lover; Jake's rum-running brother Wes, horribly damaged in body and soul; and many others. The word-heavy, shimmering descriptions gain momentum as the fierce storm makes landfall, destroying and ultimately reconfiguring the lives of everyone in this small coastal town. Tripp's challenging, poetic narrative will remind some of Michael Ondaatje and others of Barry Lopez, but she's an original. Recommended for most collections.-Jo Manning, Barry Univ. Lib., Miami Shores, FL

Copyright 2003 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

May 15, 2003
This beautifully written first novel is set in the tourist town of Westport on the coast of Massachusetts during the years 1913-38 and follows the lives of three women: Elizabeth, the wizened widow of an explorer killed during an Arctic expedition; her delicate, beautiful granddaughter, Eve, who has retreated into artistic pursuits after witnessing the death of her mother; and perpetual outsider Maggie, forever regarded as mysterious by the town's residents, who has the gift of clairvoyance and falls hard for a seething rum smuggler. Their knowledge of and interaction with the natural world seem boundless--where eels will collect under the river ice, how to press oil from a leaf, which herbs will soothe a burn--and, yet, none of them is prepared for the Great New England Hurricane of 1938, which brings with it death and a new beginning. Tripp is an unusual stylist who filters all of her characters' perceptions and emotions through their connection to the land. Haunting, ethereal, and often brutal, her novel achieves the resonance of myth.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2003, American Library Association.)