The Weight Of Water

Rating:
Summary: AWESOME!
Review: GREAT story, and it will keep you riveted! Just could not stop reading it....go get it now!

Rating:
Summary: Haunting tale
Review: Heard the taped version of THE WEIGHT OF WATER by Anita
Shreve . . . this is a haunting tale about a photographer who comes
to a small island off the coast of New Hampshire to shoot an
essay about a famous crime that took place more than a century
ago . . . Shreve, rapidly becoming one of my favorite authors,
manages to adroitly capture the lonely lives of the victims--and then
relates them to what is being felt by the photographer (whose
marriage is falling apart) . . . the ending, while very sad, is
nonetheless quite effective . . . Frances Cassidy's narration
was quite good.

Rating:
Summary: Completely torn about how to rate this.
Review: The ending of the book was so horribly sad that it came close to ruining the whole book for me. That is what I should stress - if sad (kind of pointless too) endings are not your thing - you won't like it. But this is a tragedy and if you know that going into it you'll be fine. I did love the evocative way the book was written. I really felt I was there. I felt the claustrophia, the depression, the hopelessness, the suspicion,,etc. I liked the abrupt switching back and forth between time periods. I thought it was really well done. It was slow going at first, but it was worth it.

Rating:
Summary: Review of "The Weight of Water"
Review: The book moved like a calm sea, with an easy, flowing pace that gradually and satisfyingly took you where you needed to be in each of the stories (Maren's and Jean's.) I was a bit more interested in the story of Jean's disolving marriage, which was odd as I thought I'd be more interested in the story regarding the Smuttynose murders. It was interesting how Jean's subjective observation of Thomas and Adaline's "flirtation", increasingly underlined her own mistrust of the solidity of her marriage. I did have a problem with the ending -- if you take the pace of the novel to mirror the flow of the sea on a calm day, which may have been deliberate, and the last 30 or so pages take place during a storm, then a slightly choppier ending kind of works, but regardless, I did think the ending felt rushed and not completely faithful to the rest of the book.

Rating:
Summary: spellbinding ending
Review: This is a wonderfully written melancholy tale of love that almost happened, not once but three times. Ms Shreve takes you back to that first love, the almost chances and almost moments lost. It is the ending that totally left me spellbound. I actually listened to the audio version and had to pull over and stop to play it over and over again. And then still, I could not and can not forget how one act can change people's lives forever.

Rating:
Summary: Another good one
Review: Anita Shreve delivers once more. If you've read any of her other books, then read this one too. If you have never read her books, here is a good opportunity to start.

Rating:
Summary: Fascinating
Review: Being from the City this novel refers to, I loved reading about this tale. I can't say I liked or agree with the author's conclusions, but I highly respect her ability to put this together. I found the story of the past more interesting than the current story of her relationships. Don't miss her other gem Fortune's Rock!

Rating:
Summary: Past and Present Turmoil Swirl About in Murky Water
Review: Ms Shreve has an uncanny way of getting under a reader's skin with a subtle, sad intimacy. Listening to "the Weight of Water" on audio cassette was akin to experiencing a friend's apprehension and uncertainty about her marriage by hearing her speak in installments over coffee at Starbucks. The reader, like any good friend wants to help, but is disappointed as the book draws to its climax and then its close with little hope for the future.

In this first tale (I believe the story of Thomas is picked up again in another Shreve offering), Jean is married to Thomas, a famous poet with an eye for beauty. Together they share a good life epitomized by their young five year old daughter, Billie. As a photographer Jean has been commissioned to take professional shots of a famous century-old murder site on an isolated island off the coast of New England. Immediately, Jean notices Thomas's 'eye' widening when he meets his brother's comely girlfriend onboard his brother's boat which has been commissioned to ferry the little family about the Maine coast during the project. She turns inward, simultaneously researching the murders to get a feel for the location and the memories and events in her marriage in an effort to buoy her own helplessness. When Jean stumbles upon the diary of an immigrant Norwegian woman who was an eyewitness, she finds that her own inherent unhappiness was paralleled by the events in this long-dead woman's lonely life. The unmitigated dread sensed throughout the novel unfortunately will be physically manifested in a horrifying manner which equals that of the older tragedy. Jean's "good life" ends abruptly and starkly with a gut-wrenching sucker-punch reality that leaves the reader numb with shock and cold as if plunged into that cold Atlantic sea.

All of Ms Shreve's heroines seem to be starting off with less than zero. None of them are particularly happy; their marriages are not the culmination of carefree courtships and in this regard are doomed from the start to fail on some level. I get the sense after reading three of Shreve's novels that this is the author's depiction of life: sequences of events that move along on a subterranean level with the certainty of minutes filling an hour, but with no effervescent hope for any of life's highs.

Rating:
Summary: Not a pleasant book, but powerfully affecting.
Review: What to say about a book I didn't enjoy, but read like a fiend? It's hard to read about love that's without humor, without happiness. It's especially difficult to read about a twisted, obsessive love that spirals out of control. And when emotional chaos seems to span generations, the reading gets particularly bleak. At the same time, Anita Shreve's "The Weight of Water" is a fascinating read. Partly the isolated and soulless location which infects even the reader with same depressing hopelessness felt by the characters, partly the brutal violence at the core of this story of tortuous passion and fierce suspicion--I read this at a frantic pace, caught up in this vividly awful story. Even months afterward, merely catching sight of the cover again put me right back on Smuttynose. Right back in the mare's nest of emotion which shattered a family. Not a pleasant book, but powerfully affecting.

Rating:
Summary: Weight of Water is Not Light
Review: I admire Shreve's imaginative means of weaving a story that mesmorizes the reader. I do not, however, admire her commitment to a genre of writing that self-consciously requires readers' allegiance to follow her into swampy thinking. In this book, her characters are blandly defined and dull. They include a family of husband, wife, small child, along with brother in law and young female guest, alone on a boat in New England waters. The die is cast with that format alone. The group anchors off the Isles of Shoals 9 miles out from Portsmouth, New Hampshire.....for photographic research exploration. Not for fun, necessarily, no room in this book for that, but hopefully a reasonable facsimile? After all, the dad and mom did bring their young child with them. Because no one is especially on top of their lives in this book to begin with, the dismal mood is the norm. Because each has already learned apparently, there is no benefit to try to communciate with the other, it becomes almost a non-issue as to why. Shreve skillfuly layers fictional events of her fictional characters to non-fictional events of non-fictional characters... two young Norwegian women who - in the 1870s - lived at the Isles of Shoals and were brutally massacred at Smuttynose Island by a mad man with a hatchet. No fiction here. Shreve cleverly superimposes late 20th century today with late 19th century yesterday, A subliminal sense of hopelessness does little to inspire reading on. There are suppressed passions of anger and gloom ......all the time helping readers see Shreve's message of pre-empted love from undeniable forces. Maybe that's the underlying problem with Shreve's masterfully written books. She leads us through mental journeys of total defeat.