Blue Water

March 20, 2006
In Vinegar Hill
author Ansay's latest, a probing character study, Meg Van Dorn and her husband, Rex, struggle with the loss of six-year-old son, Evan, in a crash with Cindy Ann Kreisler—Meg's best friend from high school and an alcoholic, who was drunk at the wheel. The two file a civil suit that would financially ruin the well-off Cindy Ann, but Meg has a change of heart, given the impending marriage of Meg's older brother to Cindy Ann's sister; it's more a contrived plot device than a genuine narrative event, but it does force Meg to constantly shift her perspective on the tragedy, especially as Ansay offers a sympathetic sketch of Cindy Ann and her troubled past. Most of Meg's emotional cycling takes place on the Atlantic coast, where she and Rex have gone sailing as a coping strategy and have fallen in with various strands of lower-end sailing culture: the book's best energy is spent in places like the Island Girls bar, to which Meg eventfully repairs one night without Rex. The resolution of Meg and Rex's marital issues seems glaringly underwritten in the final chapters, but on the whole, this is a solid and revelatory novel on themes of grief and loss.

March 15, 2006
As revealed in her memoir, " Limbo "(2001), Oprah author Ansay is no stranger to inexplicable suffering, and her understanding of pain and stoicism shapes her finely crafted books. Her fifth novel is a perfectly pitched, impossible--to-set-down tale of the consequences of the death of a child. Megan loses her "miracle" son in a car accident caused by a woman she was friends with back in high school, Cindy Ann, now a divorced mother with a drinking problem. Demoralized by the lawsuits they've brought against Cindy Ann and unable to resume their old lives, Megan and her husband set off on a sailboat for ports unknown. Ansay also avoids the predictable and heads into the mythic with dramatic revelations of the wildness of the ocean and the human psyche as she portrays a sisterhood of women at sea nursing secret sorrows, and charts a cathartic reconciliation as two grieving families try to regain their spiritual bearings. Ansay's story of loss becomes a saga of transformation as rage, guilt, and bottomless anguish are converted into kindness, compassion, and forgiveness.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2006, American Library Association.)