Fortune's Rocks
by Anita Shreve
Fortune’s Rocks is beautiful, moving, tearful, and poignant.
If you need more of a recommendation, I’ll elaborate. Anita Shreve has written a tale of love. A fifteen-year-old girl on the brink of self-discovery and adulthood, falls in love with her father’s friend. He is thirty years her senior, married, and has two children. Not only was divorce extremely rare at that time—this Victorian beauty is told in the early 1900s—but the married man is also a doctor, an upstanding member of the community of Fortune’s Rocks, and any whiff of scandal would ruin him. What are the star-crossed lovers to do?
I read this book in the span of four days, and I recommend you do the same. I was traveling cross-country for a wedding, but this book taught me more about marriage than my friend’s ceremony did. I wanted to savor this book, stretch it out and let the words linger in my mind, but I couldn’t put it down. I read it as I waited to check into my hotel, in the afternoon before the wedding, and on the flight home, at four in the morning. Yes, I was that person on the plane with the reading light on when everyone else is trying to sleep. Once you read this book, you’ll understand.
Shreve’s creation goes beyond the realm of well-written; the finest authors have showed their talents in equally lovely books that have earned my never-ending praise, but Fortune’s Rocks is different. Every single word has a purpose. I’ve never read a book so carefully thought out. I can’t count how many times I closed the book, too moved to continue, because a sentence Shreve wrote a hundred pages prior to my current location was given a double meaning.
There will be a few of you out there who will pick up the book, only to put it back down after twenty pages or so, claiming boredom. Keep reading. Remind yourself of the time period; life was slower at the turn of the century. The pace is deliberate. The setting and feelings of the characters must be thoroughly described before any action is taken; that’s the only way the story is effective.
This is an unforgettable book. It might not change your life the way it changed mine, but it will stick with you.
If you need more of a recommendation, I’ll elaborate. Anita Shreve has written a tale of love. A fifteen-year-old girl on the brink of self-discovery and adulthood, falls in love with her father’s friend. He is thirty years her senior, married, and has two children. Not only was divorce extremely rare at that time—this Victorian beauty is told in the early 1900s—but the married man is also a doctor, an upstanding member of the community of Fortune’s Rocks, and any whiff of scandal would ruin him. What are the star-crossed lovers to do?
I read this book in the span of four days, and I recommend you do the same. I was traveling cross-country for a wedding, but this book taught me more about marriage than my friend’s ceremony did. I wanted to savor this book, stretch it out and let the words linger in my mind, but I couldn’t put it down. I read it as I waited to check into my hotel, in the afternoon before the wedding, and on the flight home, at four in the morning. Yes, I was that person on the plane with the reading light on when everyone else is trying to sleep. Once you read this book, you’ll understand.
Shreve’s creation goes beyond the realm of well-written; the finest authors have showed their talents in equally lovely books that have earned my never-ending praise, but Fortune’s Rocks is different. Every single word has a purpose. I’ve never read a book so carefully thought out. I can’t count how many times I closed the book, too moved to continue, because a sentence Shreve wrote a hundred pages prior to my current location was given a double meaning.
There will be a few of you out there who will pick up the book, only to put it back down after twenty pages or so, claiming boredom. Keep reading. Remind yourself of the time period; life was slower at the turn of the century. The pace is deliberate. The setting and feelings of the characters must be thoroughly described before any action is taken; that’s the only way the story is effective.
This is an unforgettable book. It might not change your life the way it changed mine, but it will stick with you.