I call it the curse of the Oprah.
For the last five years, I've been in charge of my library's adult book discussion group – we meet once a month to discuss a book that I’ve picked (oh, the power!).
And to eat cookies.
Every once in a while, I'd pick a book that had, by HAPPENSTANCE, been chosen by Oprah for part of her book club designed to take over the world.
Every time we read an Oprah book, they HATED it.
They railed against the story, the writing, anything. No matter the subject matter, they hated the book – hence, the curse of the Oprah.
(To this day, I’m still leery of books with that circular “O” label on the front.)
Among those books that I naively chose was an Anita Shreve book (The Pilot's Wife), and so for a long time, I was a bit unsure about reading another other Shreve book – what if it suffered from the Oprah curse by association?
I'm so glad I changed my mind and gave her another try.
Body Surfing is Shreve's latest fiction novel, and the writing is so luminous, so lovely, I found myself rereading whole passages, getting caught up in the story and the setting.
By the age of 29, Sydney Sklar has already been married twice (one marriage ending in divorce, and one leaving her a widow), and in a bid to regain her life and find direction for herself, she agrees to serve as a tutor for the teenage daughter and the live-in help for a family summering on the New Hampshire coast. As you delve into the story, you can practically taste the sea breeze, feel the sand beneath your feet and smell the sunshine, so evocative and redolent is Shreve's writing.
Sydney gradually becomes ingratiated into the family dynamic, particularly between the two grown sons of the family, Ben and Jeff, who have come down to the family cottage for an extended summer visit. Shreve spins the story, complete with love, hate, treachery, deceit, confusion and shame into a cohesive tale that will tug at you, making you root for some characters, and despising others, but most of all, feeling for Sydney as she struggles to find her place in the family – at once a part of it, and outside it.
Over the lazy weeks of the summer, Sydney finds herself pulled into a reluctant lover’s triangle, and forms a special attachment with her tutoring charge, as well as the patriarch of the family. Secrets and fragility permeate this novel, tugging the reader to an unexpected end with a twist or two along the way.
Shreve tells this story in short, almost staccato bursts, with few chapter breaks, and only occasional lapses into dialogue, and yet it's easy to read, to follow, to absorb, despite being a different style from most typical fiction reads. The style makes this an easy book to pick up and put down, though after sailing through only a few pages, the reader will be hard pressed to put this novel down in favor of doing anything else but turning page after page.
After reading the last page, I couldn’t get the characters or plot from this novel out of my mind for days – always the sign of a good read, in my opinion. It’s one of those books you have to talk about with those who have also read it, in order to discuss the characters, the story, and the conclusion.
Not to mention that it more than ratcheted up my desire to own a weathered beachfront cottage somewhere on the New England coast – a tough thing to work through when one lives in land-locked southern Indiana.
The Ohio River just doesn’t have the same mystique, the same lyrical quality that a sleepy cottage on the vast Atlantic Ocean does.
Therefore, I’m so glad Shreve was able to transport me into that world, if only for 291 pages.
I think it’s safe to say the curse of the Oprah has been broken on this one…
Shreve is also the author of many other fiction works, including: Resistance, The Weight of Water, The Pilot’s Wife, Fortune’s Rocks, The Last Time They Met, Sea Glass, All He Ever Wanted, Light on Snow, and A Wedding In December. Shreve’s new book, Testimony, is due out on October 21, 2008.
If you enjoy reading the fiction of Anita Shreve, you may also enjoy reading Jodi Picoult, Alice Hoffman, Elizabeth Berg, Anne Tyler or Maeve Binchy.
Looking to ask the Loud Librarian a question or comment on one of her reviews? Email her at marissa.priddis@crucialpop.com.
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