Fortune's Rocks

Starred review from November 29, 1999
In what surely will be a milestone in her career, Shreve has produced a literary novel with enormous commercial appeal. It's a scandalous love story told with dignity and integrity, and a finely etched portrait of American society at the turn of the last century, a narrative that accurately reflects vanished manners and mores, while reconfirming the universality of human emotions. Olympia Biddeford, the spirited, self-confident, highly intelligent daughter of a Boston Brahmin family who summer in Fortune's Rocks, on the New Hampshire coast, is 15 years old in June 1899, the season of her sexual awakening. Her father's friend, Dr. John Haskell, a talented essayist as well as a physician committed to helping the poor, is 26 years Olympia's senior, married and the father of four. Shreve's account of their love affair is a marvel of freshness. In what resembles an exquisitely controlled slow-motion film (one thinks of the sun-dappled sequences in Elvira Madigan), Shreve shimmeringly describes a young girl's first experience of ardent attraction, combined with her first experience of mortal sin. Both Olympia and Haskell are engaging characters who cannot resist the passion that eventually destroys several lives besides their own. The bliss of their affair--rendered at fever pitch, but without false sentimentality--builds tension about the inevitability of their discovery. Although expected, the event comes with a staggering shock, one of many such surprises that Shreve injects in the narrative--impressively so, since none of the plot twists evade credibility. Even when the baby born of the liaison is taken from Olympia, Shreve avoids excessive drama. Instead, she conveys interlocking ironies foreshadowed early in the relationship, when Olympia accompanies Haskell to a clinic in nearby Ely Falls, where she first becomes aware of the desperately poor Franco-American millworkers whose wretched lives will one day intersect with hers. The level of suspense never falters, but becomes breathtaking during a custody court battle (based on late 19th-century legal precedent) involving these factory laborers, who were once an important subculture in New England. The astounding denouement of cascading events will leave no reader unmoved. While Shreve's books always show evidence of meticulous research, her hand has never been so sure as it is here. The fabric of privileged upper-class life in the 1890s is rendered in such details as the relationships between masters and servants, the daily routine at the Biddefords' "cottage" in Fortune's Rocks and in precise descriptions of home furnishings, clothing and dining. The rigid decorum of the era is conveyed with the clarity of Edith Wharton, and reflected in the formal vocabulary and the rules governing civilized conversation, and the moral code that regarded unwed mothers as despicable outcasts denied even the most minimal consolations of the social contract. Given Shreve's popularity, and adding what will surely be fervent word-of-mouth endorsement, this book should take off like a rocket. Agent, Virginia Barber. $200,000 ad/promo; BOMC main selection; 15-city author tour.

November 1, 1999
The time is the turn of the last century, the setting a rocky New Hampshire coastline resort area nicknamed "Fortune's Rocks." Olympia Biddeford, age 15, is walking the beach, feeling the first stirrings of her womanhood. The strong-willed daughter of an upstanding Boston couple, she soon "learns of desire" as she begins a passionate affair with a married writer, John Haskell, three times her age. From the moment they meet (he is a visiting friend of her father's), they experience a sexual spark--Olympia feels "liquid" in his presence. Soon, they fall into sinful trysting. Shreve (The Pilot's Wife) serves up these opening events with breathless immediacy. Once the plot gets a chance to develop--Olympia gets pregnant, gives up child, fights to get child back--it settles down considerably, turning into a modernized The Scarlet Letter, a tale of a woman attaining feminist independence by living outside her period's societal mores. Reading, Brown (of TV's The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd) clearly has the most fun at the beginning, where the story's real heat and flushed excitement pours out. Listeners, too, may grow colder as the plot loses its torrid, forbidden edge. Based on the 1999 Little, Brown hardcover.

September 15, 1999
Just bumped from January to December, Shreve's latest--set at the end of the 19th century--relates wild young Olympia Biddleford's affair with a married doctor three times her age.

Copyright 1999 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

October 1, 1999
Shreve's last novel, "The Pilot's Wife" (1998), was an Oprah pick, so her newest work is guaranteed a large and ready audience. A polished and magnetic, if formulaic, storyteller, Shreve takes her readers back to the turn of the last century and deep into the psyche of 15-year-old Olympia Biddeford, the only child of wealthy, cultured, and well-meaning parents. It's summer, and the Biddefords have moved for the season into their New Hampshire seaside cottage, which was once a convent. It faces the treacherous coast, which gives the place (and Shreve's novel) its haunting name, and this setting, just like every other seemingly casual detail, presages the high drama to come. It begins when Olympia suddenly senses that she is no longer a child. Even her father, who has been home-schooling her, detects something different about his smart and beautiful daughter as he instructs her to read a book of socially conscious essays written by Dr. John Haskell, who, along with his wife and children, will be their dinner guest. Olympia evinces no interest until she and Haskell--41, handsome, and intense--come face-to-face and are shot through with that awful current that signals love-at-first-sight. Their reckless affair precipitates a scandal of immense proportions, resulting in a harrowing separation and pregnancy. As sexy as their taboo liaisons are, Shreve is just as compelling in her descriptions of Olympia's solitary suffering in their aftermath, and in the rousing courtroom scenes that pave the way for a morally triumphant happy ending. This is exceptionally fine entertainment. ((Reviewed October 1, 1999))(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 1999, American Library Association.)