TITLE: Fortune’s Rocks
AUTHOR: Anita Shreve
PAGES: 480
Every summer, crowds of the wealthy and socially esteemed flock to the coastal town of Fortune’s Rocks. Beach homes line the shore, one of which belongs to the prominent family of 15-year-old Olympia Biddeford. It is the turn of the century, and the turning of Olympia’s life; events will inevitably unfold, plunging her from girl to woman, and altering her forever. This summer, the summer in which she turns sixteen, is the summer that she meets John Haskell: an established physician, an advocate against the harsh conditions for factory workers, devoted husband, loving father. For Olympia, who is her father’s greatest pride and ongoing project, not even her unusually thorough and contemporary education can prepare her for this first dangerous encounter with desire. Nor can her intelligence and her position in life protect her from the consequences of loving a man who can never belong to her.
Fortune’s Rocks begins Anita Shreve’s series of books that all take place in the same New Hampshire house, in different decades. I liked the Victorian setting, and it went a long way in making the forbidden relationship between Olympia and Haskell that much more enhanced. In a society so structured, their deviation from the norm became doubly terrifying and even more alluring at the same time. So far, I have noticed that each of these books portrays a woman who is waiting, forced to sit still while the world turns all around her and is constantly changing; Olympia waits in hiding, wrestling with the idea that she may never have the opportunity to really know the man she loves, while Honora (Sea Glass) waits for a husband she discovers she hardly knows, and Kathryn (The Pilot’s Wife) explores the aftermath of learning that the husband she thought she knew was actually as distant from her as the moon. I think Anita Shreve does the most amazing job of creating intricate, complex relationships and conflicts between and within her characters. I can’t wait to find the last book in this series.