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© 2000 Kathy Craig |
The Weight of Water
by Anita Shreve
June 1998
Synopsis
"On a small island off the New Hampshire coast in 1873, two women were brutally murdered by an unknown assailant. A third woman survived the attack, hiding in a sea cave until dawn. More than a century later, a photographer, Jean, comes to the island to shoot a photo-essay about the legendary crime. Immersing herself in accounts of the lives of the fishermen's wives who were its victims, she becomes obsessed with the barrenness of these women's days: the ardor-killing labor, the long stretches of loneliness, the maddening relentless winds that threatened to scour them off the rocky island. How could a marriage survive those privations? Was this misery connected to the killings? Jean's marriage is enduring heavy weather of its own. On the boat she has chartered for this project, she and her husband are falling apart. Their nights are full of drink and terrible silences, and Jean feels jealousy and distrust invading her life and her work. The forces that blasted the island a century earlier come alive inside Jean, bringing her to the verge of actions she never dreamed herself capable of - with no idea whether her choices will destroy all she has ever valued or bring her safely home." (Publisher)
Reviews
- "If ever a work of fiction earned the description 'a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma,' this is it, and more--a cryptic long-lost narrative inside an impending family tragedy wrapped in a true-crime murder mystery framed by the aftermath of all of the above. Deftly moving among almost as many plot lines as there are islands and employing at least two distinct voices, Ms.Shreve unravels themes of adultery, jealousy, crimes of passion, incest, negligence, loss and guilt, and then manages somehow to knit them all together into an engrossing tale--a fine seaborne story of the double." (Susan Kenney - The New York Times Book Review )
- "In 1873, two women living on the Isles of Shoals, a lonely, windswept group of islands off the coast of New Hampshire, were brutally murdered. A third woman survived, cowering in a sea cave until dawn. More than a century later, Jean, a magazine photographer working on a photo essay about the murders, returns to the Isles with her husband, Thomas, and their five-year-old daughter, Billie, aboard a boat skippered by her brother-in-law, Rich, who has brought along his girlfriend, Adaline. As Jean becomes immersed in the details of the 19th-century murders, Thomas and Adaline find themselves drawn together-with potentially ruinous consequences. Shreve (Where or When; Resistance) perfectly captures the ubiquitous dampness of life on a sailboat, deftly evoking the way in which the weather comes to dictate all actions for those at sea. With the skill of a master shipbuilder, Shreve carefully fits her two stories together, tacking back and forth between the increasingly twisted murder mystery and the escalating tensions unleashed by the threat of a dangerous shipboard romance. Written with assurance and grace, plangent with foreboding and a taut sense of inexorability, The Weight of Water is a powerfully compelling tale of passion, a provocative and disturbing meditation on the nature of love." (Publishers Weekly)
Book Club Rating and Comments
If you or your book club has read this book and would like to share your comments, please email us at upthecreekbc@yahoo.com.
Other Books by Anita Shreve
- 'Eden Close'
- 'Fortune's Rocks'
- 'The Last Time They Met' (See August 2002)
- 'The Pilot's Wife'
- 'Resistance'
- 'Strange Fits of Passion'
- 'Where or When'