Where I share my love of books with reviews, features, giveaways and memes. Family and needlepoint are thrown in from time to time.
Showing posts with label Anita Shreve. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Anita Shreve. Show all posts

Thursday, September 24, 2009

A Change in Altitude by Anita Shreve (Book Review)


Title: A Change in Altitude
Author: Anita Shreve
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company (Hachette)

First sentence: We're climbing Mount Kenya.

About the book: Twenty-eight-year old Margaret travels to Kenya with her new husband, Patrick, with the intent of staying a year. In a dizzying multicultural city, she struggles to maintain her balance as her sense of self, her marriage, and her understanding of the world are shaken to the core.

Invited on a climbing expedition to Mt. Kenya, the newlyweds are caught up in a horrific accident. In its aftermath, Margaret must try to understand exactly what happened on that mountain and what it has done to her and to her marriage.

A major author in terms of critical acclaim and bestseller status, Anita Shreve limns the secrets at the core of our closest relationships and the ways in which lives can turn on the axis of a single catastrophic event. (back cover)

My thoughts: I did not finish this book. This was my first Anita Shreve book and it just didn't appeal to me. I wanted to like it - I have heard so many good things about this author! Maybe it is just bad timing and my mood was not right to be able to get into this one. I am hoping that sometime soon I can try another one by her - or maybe give this one another shot - and see if I feel differently. So readers - what is your favorite Anita Shreve book? Which one should I try?

A Change in Altitude
Publisher/Publication Date: Little, Brown and Company, Sept 2009
ISBN: 978-0-316-02070-1
320 pages

Tuesday, July 28, 2009

ARC Arrival: A Change in Altitude

A Change in Altitude by Anita Shreve

Publisher: Little, Brown and Company/Hachette Books

About the book: Twenty-eight-year-old Margaret travels to Kenya with her new husband, Patrick, with the intent of staying a year. In a dizzying multicultural city, she struggles to maintain her balance as her sense of self, her marriage, and her understanding of the world are shaken to the core.

Invited on a climbing expedition to Mt. Kenya, the newlyweds are caught up in a horrific accident. In its aftermath, Margaret must try to understand exactly what happened on that mountain and what it has done to her and to her marriage.

A major author in terms of critical acclaim and bestseller status, Anita Shreve limns the secrets at the core of our closest relationships and the ways in which lives can turn on the axis of a single catastrophic event. (from the back cover)

About the author: Anita Shreve is the acclaimed author of fourteen previous novels, including Testimony; The Pilot's Wife, which was a selection of Oprah's Book Club; and The Weight of Water, which was a finalist for England's Orange Prize. She lives in Massachusetts. (from the back cover)

A Change in Altitude
Publisher/Publication Date: Little, Brown and Company, Sept 22, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-316-02070-1
320 pages

Sunday, May 24, 2009

Wonderful Win: Testimony


Testimony by Anita Shreve

Publisher: Little, Brown and Company/Hachette Books

I won this book from Teddy Rose at So Many Precious Books, So Little Time. This was one of the first blogs that I started following last year - It is a great blog with a large variety of books and information about books - If you are unfamiliar with her, you should go take a look!

About the book: Enter a world upended by the repercussions of a single impulsive action. At an exclusive New England boarding school, a sex scandal unleashes a storm of shame and recrimination. The men, women, and teenagers affected - among them the headmaster, struggling to contain the scandal before it destroys the school; a well-liked scholarship student and star basketball player, grappling with the consequences of his mistakes; his mother, confronting her own forbidden temptations; and a troubled teenage girl eager to put the past behind her - speak out to relate the events of one fateful night and its aftermath.

Writing with a pace and intensity surpassing even her greatest work, Anita Shreve explores the impulses that drive ordinary people into intolerable dilemmas.

About the author: For many readers, the appeal of Anita Shreve’s novels is their ability to combine all of the escapist elements of a good beach read with the kind of thoughtful complexity not generally associated with romantic fiction. Shreve’s books are loaded with enough adultery, eroticism, and passion to make anyone keep flipping the pages, but the writer whom People magazine once dubbed a “master storyteller” is also concerned with the complexities of her characters’ motivations, relationships, and lives.

Shreve’s novels draw on her diverse experiences as a teacher and journalist: she began writing fiction while teaching high school, and was awarded an O. Henry Prize in 1975 for her story, “Past the Island, Drifting.” She then spent several years working as a journalist in Africa, and later returned to the States to raise her children. In the 1980s, she wrote about women’s issues, which resulted in two nonfiction books -- Remaking Motherhood and Women Together, Women Alone -- before breaking into mainstream fiction with Eden Close in 1989.

This interest in women’s lives -- their struggles and success, families and friendships -- informs all of Shreve’s fiction. The combination of her journalist’s eye for detail and her literary ear for the telling turn of phrase mean that Shreve can spin a story that is dense, atmospheric, and believable. Shreve incorporates the pull of the sea -- the inexorable tides, the unpredictable surf -- into her characters’ lives the way Willa Cather worked the beauty and wildness of the Midwestern plains into her fiction. In Fortune’s Rocks and The Weight of Water, the sea becomes a character itself, evocative and ultimately consuming. In Sea Glass, Shreve takes the metaphor as far as she can, where characters are tested again and again, only to emerge stronger by surviving the ravages of life.

A domestic sensualist, Shreve makes use of the emblems of household life to a high degree, letting a home tell its stories just as much as its inhabitants do, and even recycling the same house through different books and periods of time, giving it a sort of palimpsest effect, in which old stories burn through the newer ones, creating a historical montage. "A house with any kind of age will have dozens of stories to tell," she says. "I suppose if a novelist could live long enough, one could base an entire oeuvre on the lives that weave in and out of an antique house."

Shreve’s work is sometimes categorized as “women’s fiction,” because of her focus on women’s sensibilities and plights. But her evocative and precise language and imagery take her beyond category fiction, and moderate the vein of sentimentality which threads through her books. Moreover, her kaleidoscopic view of history, her iron grip on the details and detritus of 19th-century life (which she sometimes intersperses with a 20th-century story), and her uncanny ability to replicate 19th-century dialogue without sounding fusty or fussy, make for novels that that are always absorbing and often riveting. If she has a flaw, it is that her imagery is sometimes too cinematic, but one can hardly fault her for that: after all, the call of Hollywood is surely as strong as the call of the sea for a writer as talented as Shreve.(from Barnes and Noble)


Testimony
Publication Date: May 2009
ISBN-13: 9780316067348
352 pages

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