Fortune's Rocks: A Novel
(Libby/OverDrive eBook, Kindle)

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 SeamanAdult Books Young adult recommendations in this issue have been contributed by the Books for Youth editorial staff and by reviewers Sue-Ellen Beauregard, Nancy Bent, Ann Bouricius, Jane Byczek, Patty Engelmann, Diane Tixier Herald, Leone McDermott, Emily Melton, Karen Simonetti, Candace Smith, and Linda Waddle. Titles recommended for teens are marked with the following symbols: YA, for books of general YA interest; YA/C, for books with particular curriculum value; YA/L, for books with a limited teenage audience; YA/M, for books best suited to mature teens.

In what surely will be a milestone in her career, Shreve has produced a literary novel with enormous commercial appeal. It's a scandalous love story told with dignity and integrity, and a finely etched portrait of American society at the turn of the last century, a narrative that accurately reflects vanished manners and mores, while reconfirming the universality of human emotions. Olympia Biddeford, the spirited, self-confident, highly intelligent daughter of a Boston Brahmin family who summer in Fortune's Rocks, on the New Hampshire coast, is 15 years old in June 1899, the season of her sexual awakening. Her father's friend, Dr. John Haskell, a talented essayist as well as a physician committed to helping the poor, is 26 years Olympia's senior, married and the father of four. Shreve's account of their love affair is a marvel of freshness. In what resembles an exquisitely controlled slow-motion film (one thinks of the sun-dappled sequences in Elvira Madigan), Shreve shimmeringly describes a young girl's first experience of ardent attraction, combined with her first experience of mortal sin. Both Olympia and Haskell are engaging characters who cannot resist the passion that eventually destroys several lives besides their own. The bliss of their affairÄrendered at fever pitch, but without false sentimentalityÄbuilds tension about the inevitability of their discovery. Although expected, the event comes with a staggering shock, one of many such surprises that Shreve injects in the narrativeÄimpressively so, since none of the plot twists evade credibility. Even when the baby born of the liaison is taken from Olympia, Shreve avoids excessive drama. Instead, she conveys interlocking ironies foreshadowed early in the relationship, when Olympia accompanies Haskell to a clinic in nearby Ely Falls, where she first becomes aware of the desperately poor Franco-American millworkers whose wretched lives will one day intersect with hers. The level of suspense never falters, but becomes breathtaking during a custody court battle (based on late 19th-century legal precedent) involving these factory laborers, who were once an important subculture in New England. The astounding denouement of cascading events will leave no reader unmoved. While Shreve's books always show evidence of meticulous research, her hand has never been so sure as it is here. The fabric of privileged upper-class life in the 1890s is rendered in such details as the relationships between masters and servants, the daily routine at the Biddefords' "cottage" in Fortune's Rocks and in precise descriptions of home furnishings, clothing and dining. The rigid decorum of the era is conveyed with the clarity of Edith Wharton, and reflected in the formal vocabulary and the rules governing civilized conversation, and the moral code that regarded unwed mothers as despicable outcasts denied even the most minimal consolations of the social contract. Given Shreve's popularity, and adding what will surely be fervent word-of-mouth endorsement, this book should take off like a rocket. Agent, Virginia Barber. $200,000 ad/promo; BOMC main selection; 15-city author tour. (Dec.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Just bumped from January to December, Shreve's latestÄset at the end of the 19th centuryÄrelates wild young Olympia Biddleford's affair with a married doctor three times her age. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Shreve's seventh novel (Pilot's Wife, 1998, etc.) is a pleasantly atmospheric fin-de-siŠcle 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 don't 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 Olympia's emerging sexuality, her family cottage on Fortune's 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 Fortune's 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 Fortune's 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 wins'the adoptive parents are too grubby to raise the boy correctly'she 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 Olympia's 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)

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. ((Reviewed October 1, 1999)) Copyright 2000 Booklist Reviews

Just bumped from January to December, Shreve's latestAset at the end of the 19th centuryArelates wild young Olympia Biddleford's affair with a married doctor three times her age. Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

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. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 9/15/99.]ABeth Gibbs, P.L. of Charlotte & Mecklenburg Cty., NC Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

In what surely will be a milestone in her career, Shreve has produced a literary novel with enormous commercial appeal. It's a scandalous love story told with dignity and integrity, and a finely etched portrait of American society at the turn of the last century, a narrative that accurately reflects vanished manners and mores, while reconfirming the universality of human emotions. Olympia Biddeford, the spirited, self-confident, highly intelligent daughter of a Boston Brahmin family who summer in Fortune's Rocks, on the New Hampshire coast, is 15 years old in June 1899, the season of her sexual awakening. Her father's friend, Dr. John Haskell, a talented essayist as well as a physician committed to helping the poor, is 26 years Olympia's senior, married and the father of four. Shreve's account of their love affair is a marvel of freshness. In what resembles an exquisitely controlled slow-motion film (one thinks of the sun-dappled sequences in Elvira Madigan), Shreve shimmeringly describes a young girl's first experience of ardent attraction, combined with her first experience of mortal sin. Both Olympia and Haskell are engaging characters who cannot resist the passion that eventually destroys several lives besides their own. The bliss of their affair rendered at fever pitch, but without false sentimentality builds tension about the inevitability of their discovery. Although expected, the event comes with a staggering shock, one of many such surprises that Shreve injects in the narrative impressively so, since none of the plot twists evade credibility. Even when the baby born of the liaison is taken from Olympia, Shreve avoids excessive drama. Instead, she conveys interlocking ironies foreshadowed early in the relationship, when Olympia accompanies Haskell to a clinic in nearby Ely Falls, where she first becomes aware of the desperately poor Franco-American millworkers whose wretched lives will one day intersect with hers. The level of suspense never falters, but becomes breathtaking during a custody court battle (based on late 19th-century legal precedent) involving these factory laborers, who were once an important subculture in New England. The astounding denouement of cascading events will leave no reader unmoved. While Shreve's books always show evidence of meticulous research, her hand has never been so sure as it is here. The fabric of privileged upper-class life in the 1890s is rendered in such details as the relationships between masters and servants, the daily routine at the Biddefords' "cottage" in Fortune's Rocks and in precise descriptions of home furnishings, clothing and dining. The rigid decorum of the era is conveyed with the clarity of Edith Wharton, and reflected in the formal vocabulary and the rules governing civilized conversation, and the moral code that regarded unwed mothers as despicable outcasts denied even the most minimal consolations of the social contract. Given Shreve's popularity, and adding what will surely be fervent word-of-mouth endorsement, this book should take off like a rocket. Agent, Virginia Barber. $200,000 ad/promo; BOMC main selection; 15-city author tour. (Dec.) Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.