Rating: 
Summary: Mediocre at best
Review: I am a fan of Anita Shreve's work, and would site Weight of Water as one of my favorite books, but this overly long novel was a huge disappointment. The thought of a 14 year old girl becoming so overcome with passion for a 41 year old colleague of her father's is ludicrous. The characters came across as cold and totally unsympathetic, the dialogue was stilted to the point where I found myself laughing at passages that were certainly not meant to be humorous. Give this one a pass, I wish I had.
Rating: 
Summary: Passion Overcomes Morality in Turn of Century Tale
Review: Anita Shreve takes a step into the past with this book which begins in 1899 and follows the life of Olympia Biddeford, a privileged young girl from the Boston society world. Educated by a doting, cultured, and scholarly father, Olympia is intelligent and sophisticated beyond her years; however, when she meets a friend of her father's, Dr. John Haskell, she is already primed, at 15, to enter the idealistic and free-thinking world of Dr. Haskell who has written a book of essays detailing the horrors of factory life in New England. Besides his mind, Olympia forms an immediated physical, if idealistic attachment to the doctor which is reciprocated despite his apparently successful marriage and children. What follows is a passionate and ultimately scandalous love affair that predictably nearly ruins them both. There is plenty of suspense in the novel despite the somewhat cliched scenes that necessarliy occur. One wishes for their love to be unsuspect while at the same time wondering in near disbelief at the Victorian moral code that seems to rule their every move. It takes a while to get past the antiquated societal strictures, but eventually, one finds that this is a love story with all the passion and steam of a modern novel yet with the ever-restricting problems of "what people will think." Overall, it is well written with lovely descriptions of seaside New England as well as the triumph of what is really moral--not just what people think and what society says.
Rating:
Summary: Sadly disappointing
Review: I am a dedicated reader and fan of Anita Shreve and have loved all of her other works. However, this book was disappointing from the first page. I could not relate to any of the characters...I never felt any connection to them at all. The fact that a 41 year old man could fall in love with a 15 year old at first sight is beyond my comprehension, even in the present day, let alone a century ago. The prose is overly dramatic and there were passages that did not keep my attention at all. I hope her next novel improves upon this one...
Rating:
Summary: Fortune's Rocks = Romance Novel
Review: "Fortune's Rocks" should be classified as a Romance novel, meaning, if you like the kind of book that shows and woman in a rapturous embrace on the cover, you'll probably like this. If you think that Anita Shreve does a good job portraying "real people" you need to expand your reading list. The prose was overly elaborate (for example, Olympia said "Was it not?" at the end of 90% of her sentences)and dripping with ridiculous metaphors and sentimental heartstring tugs. "It was not" worthy of a writer I've heard much about.
Rating: 
Summary: Why?
Review: Fortune's Rocks kept me asking why: Why does John Haskell give in to passions for a teenager? Why does Olympia's father move from condemnation to forgiveness? Why does her mother apparently remain without a voice or an opinion? Why does Olympia herself never fear that her father's funds might dry up? The novel is all plot - albeit beautifully written and deeply researched plot - with an occasional Big Message and very little insight into its characters. But it sucked me in and kept me reading... why?The story's rhythm is that of the New Hampshire coast: the waves keep coming in, each one different but with a similar result. The author's repetition of scenes and thoughts and language lull like a gentle surf and pull the reader along with them, but ultimately, none of the characters seems to grow believably over these 13 years. Where they do change, if they do, we're still left asking... why?
Rating:
Summary: It was good, it was bad, and then....It was stupid.
Review: It started off alright. Teenage girl, trying to rebell. and then she has a crush on a married man. It happens. But then it got unbelieveable. How many middle age merried men with a buncha kids, one of which is this girls age, run off? and then they live happily ever after??!! nope. I just can't understand that. it, it makes no sense to me. So i give it 3/5 stars because 3/5 of the book was believeable.
Rating:
Summary: A second in time with disastrous results or not!
Review: The year is 1899 and this is the story of an intelligent, well-bred young girl of 15 who falls in love with a married man almost 3 times her age. As you might surmise this is a recipe for deception and a future where both are spurned by the cultured set that were once there friends and family. The author gives us three-dimensional characters that are interesting, exuding warmth and true human qualities, as well as inadequacies. The book brings us full circle to a choice of compelling sadness and difficulty that only the "Wisdom of Solomon" could answer to. It is the story of loves lost and found, and the rising of a phoenix from the ashes of what was once an auspicious life. A well-written book by an enjoyable author, certainly worth the time.
Rating: 
Summary: Shreve Knows How People Work-Emotions, Memories,&Representat
Review: First of all I just want say that I have never been let down by an Anita Shreve book. The first one I read was Eden Close, and though I was only ten, I knew that the words I beheld were special. I intend to reread that book now that I'm an adult and will understand it. In this "review" I want to do two things; tell you to READ THIS BOOK AND ALL THE OTHERS BY SHREVE, and to address the some of the other reviewers comments. One of the reviewers said that Olympia and John are not very sympathetic characters- that they are rather selfish. Real people (at least in my experience) are not always very sympathetic, and Shreve does indeed make Olympia and John (all the other characters too) very real. What she has done is take two "ordinary and respectable" people and put them in circumstances that are anything but. She puts them in a situation they never expected themselves to be in leading to actions on their parts they would never before have considered doing, and thus she shows us that who we think we are and what we think we stand for don't always coincide with the reality of our true person. We can all relate to being caught in something; not knowing how we got there, or how to get out. Another reviewer said that her dialogue is "flat" and clumsy. In Fortune's Rocks Shreve writes in images that have the same feel as our own memories do. It can be easy to recall the color of the ocean, or the scent of a lover, but dialogue is not easy to recall, most of the time our memories don't consist of much dialogue, and when they do it IS flat and fragmented. The flatness of the dialogue has another purpose in my opinion, people often do not say what they really truly feel at heart, which leads to a certain falseness of speech, and sometimes when they do say what they really mean (to express their emotions) they often do it in a very controlled "flat" way to guard themselves from rejection, ridicule, and persecution. Shreve conveys her knowledge of human nature in this book. We should all be able to see ourselves in it.
Rating:
Summary: Beautifully Written, Engrossing, Falling Unforgivably Short
Review: The opening paragraph of Anita Shreve's story is sublime and inspired. I was so impressed by it that I read it aloud to my husband. The story follows in vivid detail, and the reader is fluently transported back to the moody New England oceanside during the forgotten era between Alexander Graham Bell and World War I. The unlikely love affair between a 15-year-old girl and a 41-year-old man happens abruptly, but their love for each other is convincing - romantic and strong but in no way smarmy. I find the characters entirely realistic, yet this is a neat literary trick, because they are all terribly typical of their appointed role in the story. The characters are not multi-faceted, not quirky nor profound. Faltering scenes of dialogue aggravate this flatness. The conversations throughout the book are painfully contrived and unnatural. They obscure the feelings behind a situation rather than enhance. Too often, a poorly placed or uncomfortably phrased spoken word from a character abruptly halts the otherwise captivating narrative flow. Furthermore, though the love affair is credible, as are the scenarios that follow its discovery, the plot line is simplistic and unimaginative. Worse, the story offers only superficial moral implications. The too-good-to-be-true ending is a disappointment... despite my unexplainable sympathy towards the characters. Still, I was deeply absorbed by this story. Less than halfway through, I threw the book to the floor and vowed to read no more...not because the story was simple or the dialogue grating, but because of emotional distress caused by my attachment to the main character. Later, I found myself crying at a scene in the book that an objective viewer might not find particularly sad. Anita Shreve persists as an undeniably gifted storyteller, despite her evident flaws.
Rating:
Summary: Just another Romance
Review: Books come and go, some spark that special something inside of you, "Fortune's Rocks" isn't one of those books. Sure it has hope and passion, and it's plot can be captivating, but in the end, it's just another romance novel, nothing more than a souped up dime store novel. Anita Shreve only copied the basic plot... boy and girl meet, fall in love, tragedy strikes, a struggle begins, then they manage to re-conquer their lost feelings. Try again, this time come up with an original idea
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