Fortune's Rocks: A Novel [Paperback]

Hester Prynne never had it so good! The year is 1899, and Olympia Biddeford, the headstrong daughter of a Boston Brahmin family, has decided to test the limits of her cloistered world. Spending the summer at her father's New Hampshire estate, the teenage heroine of Fortune's Rocks is entranced with the visiting salon of artists, writers, and lawyers. She's especially captivated, however, by John Haskell, a charismatic physician who ministers to the blue-collar community in the nearby mill towns. This middle-aged Good Samaritan hires Olympia to assist him as a nurse, and their collaboration soon evolves into a fiery love affair. Alas, it's only a matter of weeks before this passionate exercise in managed care is exposed--with disastrous consequences for the young, impregnated heroine. Even her adoring father now considers her "an overplump sixteen-year-old girl whose judgment can no longer be trusted," and insists that she break off her relationship:

"There is nothing more to be said on this subject," he says. She bites her lip to keep from crying out further. She holds the arms of her chair so tightly she later will have cramps in her fingers. She will refuse to obey him, she thinks. She will accept his implied challenge and set off on her own. But in the next moment, she asks herself: How will she be able to do that? Without her father's support, she cannot hope to survive. And if she herself does not survive, then a child cannot live."

In the end, Anita Shreve's seventh novel is a polished, supremely entertaining variation on Wuthering Heights, with Olympia and Haskell sitting in for Catherine and Heathcliff. The author did some meticulous research for her New England background, which gives this study of one particular wayward woman some extra historical heft. Some readers may find the plot twists a bit pat. And despite Olympia's efforts to be an independent woman, she overcomes her trials largely as a result of her family's wealth and station, which takes the edge off Shreve's feminist message. Still, Fortune's Rocks is a romance in the classic sense of the word, and should be enjoyed as such, unless the reader is absolutely allergic to happy endings. --Ted Leventhal --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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 sparkAOlympia 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 developAOlympia gets pregnant, gives up child, fights to get child backAit 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. (Dec.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Since Shreve's last book (The Pilot's Wife) was an Oprah pick, she's sure to have a winner with this one. But even without Oprah's help, this book is not to be missed. Fortune's Rocks takes Shreve back to her forteAa literary novel set in a historical framework. It worked beautifully in The Weight of Water, and it does here as well. As the year 1899 moves toward 1900, Olympia Biddesford is a 15-year-old on the cusp of womanhood. Spending the summer with her family at Fortune's Rocks, a New Hampshire coastal community, she meets John Haskell, an esteemed friend of her father. Though John has a wife and four children, he and Olympia are instant soulmates. Their intense affair creates complete havoc in both of their lives. A few weeks of joy turn into years of pain and redemption, culminating in a tense, page-turning trial at the end of the book. Shreve's writing is just complex and meaty enough to portray the time period perfectly, and it's a beautifully told story. Order multiple copies, and put yourself on the holds list! This will fly off the shelves.
-ABeth Gibbs, P.L. of Charlotte & Mecklenburg Cty., NC
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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. Donna Seaman --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Shreves seventh novel (Pilots Wife, 1998, etc.) is a pleasantly atmospheric fin-de-sicle tale of high-society adultery, in which love ultimately triumphs for a gorgeously written heroine who seems to belong in a different century. At a time when women dont show their ankles in public, Olympia Biddeford embarks on a summer 1899 idyll on the New Hampshire shore. With grace and understatement, Shreve evokes 15-year-old Olympias emerging sexuality, her family cottage on Fortunes Rocks, and the bright, sea-clean season. The perfect complement to the heroine's enchanted world is Dr. John Haskell, a physician and writer who provides care to the poor of a nearby mill town. Despite his wife and children, Haskell and Olympia fall in love and are soon caught in flagrante. Disgraced, the Biddeford family leaves Fortunes Rocks for Boston, where Olympia discovers she is pregnant. She gives birth, the child is taken to an orphanage, and Olympia is exiled to a western Massachusetts convent. Olympia eventually returns to the cottage at Fortunes Rocks to rebuild her life. She seeks out and finds her lost son, and files a suit to recover him. The trial (a very '90s concoction, with ethnic and class conflict at its heart) is stirring, and though Olympia winsthe adoptive parents are too grubby to raise the boy correctlyshe refuses the victory when she sees their pain. Haskell returns from his exile in the West, where he has been treating immigrants and Native Americans, to find Olympias love for him still strong. They marry, and, sensing the distant strains of political correctness, convert the cottage into a birthing center for unmarried women. Olympia leaps out in sharp focus from the first page, but the conscientiously tangled plotting and the muddle it provokes in her show the strain of transplanting a millenial sensibility back a hundred years.($200,000 ad/promo; author tour) -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

'Exceptionally fine ... Shreve writes with power and passion' DAILY EXPRESS; 'A powerful portrait of that dangerous limbo of a girl's adolescence when she is no longer a child but not yet a woman' LITERARY REVIEW; 'A quiet but highly charged novel in which intense emotion is counterpointed with an evocation of landscape' Elizabeth Buchan, THE TIMES; 'It seems like a mighty poem. FORTUNE'S ROCKS, you know, will prove much more than a place name' OBSERVER --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

Everywhere hailed for its emotional intensity and unflagging narrative momentum, this magnificent novel transports us to the turn of the twentieth century, to the world of a prominent Boston family summering on the New Hampshire coast, and to the social orbit of a spirited young woman who falls into a passionate, illicit affair with an older man, with cataclysmic results.

Anita Shreve is the author of eleven novels, all published by Little, Brown and Abacus. --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

With compassion and energy, Hughes reads the story of 16-year-old Olympia Biddeford's angst-laden, tragic affair with the charismatic John Haskell. The themes of forbidden love and coming of age, as well as teen pregnancy in turn-of-the-century New England, overshadow the additional issues of changes in women's lives and education. Shreve has written a sensual, cinematic novel, and Hughes's throaty contralto warms in tone and pace to the descriptions of New Hampshire beaches, sifting sand, and the warmth of the sun. This listening experience is delightful. S.C.A. © AudioFile 2000, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.