Sea Glass

Sea Glass by Anita Shreve
Fiction
2002 Little, Brown and Company
Quit 8/11/11
Rating: DNF





Publisher’s Blurb:

With all the narrative power and emotional immediacy that have made her novels acclaimed international bestsellers, Anita Shreve unfolds a richly engaging tale of marriage, money, and troubled times—the story of a pair of young newlyweds who, setting out to build a life together in a derelict beach house on the Atlantic coast, soon discover how threatening the world outside their front door can be.

Sea Glass is the third volume in a series set on the coast of New Hampshire. The large coastal home featured in The Pilot’s Wife and Fortune’s Rocks is once again the focal point of this story. I thoroughly enjoyed the earlier novels in this series, so I was disappointed that this book didn’t live up to my expectations. Each chapter centers around one of six characters and is typically only a couple of pages in length. I usually don’t mind short chapters and can go back and forth between narrators, so it wasn’t the style of formatting that bothered me, but rather a general disinterest in the thin plot, coupled with a lack of affection for any of the characters.

Looking back on all the books I’ve read by Anita Shreve, it’s a wonder I keep trying to find a winner. I loved Fortune’s Rocks and The Pilot’s Wife, but was less impressed with A Wedding in December, Light on Snow, The Weight of Water, and now Sea Glass. I still have some of her backlist in my stacks, so we’ll see if any of them are as enjoyable as the first two I mentioned.