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Summary
Summary
A labyrinthine tale of truth and deception from acclaimed novelist Anita Shreve Everyone believes that Maureen and Harrold English, two successful New York City journalists, have a happy, stable marriage. It's the early '70s and no one discusses or even suspects domestic abuse. But after Maureen suffers another brutal beating, she flees with her infant daughter to a coastal town in Maine. The weeks pass slowly, and just as Maureen begins to settle into her new life and new identity, Harrold reappears, bringing the story to a violent, unforgettable climax.
Author Notes
Anita Shreve grew up in Dedham, Massachusetts. After receiving a bachelor's degree in English from Tufts University, she taught high school English for five years before becoming a full-time author. She worked for an English-language magazine in Nairobi and wrote for everything from Cosmopolitan magazine to The New York Times. Her nonfiction books included Remaking Motherhood and Women Together, Women Alone. Her novels included Eden Close, Strange Fits of Passion, Where or When, Fortune's Rocks, Rescue, Stella Bain, and The Stars are Fire. Several of her books were made into movies including The Pilot's Wife, Resistance, and The Weight of Water. She died from cancer on March 29, 2018 at the age of 71.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (3)
Publisher's Weekly Review
As she did in her first novel, Eden Close , Shreve opens this absorbing story with oblique hints of a violent event--here a murder committed by a woman in response to domestic abuse--then segues to flashbacks that slowly reveal the circumstances leading up to it. A reporter who wrote a book about the crime shares her notes, presented in alternating versions and voices. Most affecting is the voice of the accused woman, who flees Manhattan with her six-month-old daughter to seek sanctuary in a coastal Maine village where she is protected by the clannish but sympathetic townspeople. She finds temporary solace in an affair with a sensitive lobsterman, but is betrayed to her husband by another man out of jealousy. Shreve is particularly effective in evoking the landscape and atmosphere of a close-knit community and the authentic vernacular of its nicely differentiated inhabitants. Her elegiac, portentous prose provides effective pacing. The novel's main drawback, however, lies in its predictability, and in the lack of credibility for the heroine's violent act, faults Shreve somewhat overcomes by raising the question of journalistic integrity (did the reporter alter her notes?) and the possibility that the accused woman's account might have contained deliberate falsehoods. In spite of its superficialities, however, the novel is often insightful and moving. (Apr.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
As in her acclaimed Eden Close (1989), Shreve here picks up the loose threads of long-ago murder to weave a gripping and articulate story that has much to say about love and spite and domestic tragedy. By her own account, Maureen English is fleeing from a brutally abusive husband when she takes her infant daughter, Caroline, and leaves their N.Y.C. apartment. The year is 1970, and Maureen's husband, Harrold, is a respected reporter for a prominent newsmagazine. She's certain no one would believe her story. After driving frantically up the coast, Maureen settles in St. Hilaire, a tiny fishing village in Maine, where she rents a cottage and attracts a fair amount of attention--including the attention of a married fisherman named Jack Strout. With Jack, Maureen finds a kind of happiness she's never known and she feels her life begin to turn around--until Harrold shows up. The murder that follows draws nationwide interest, and Helen Scofield, a young reporter at Harrold's magazine, seizes the opportunity to write her version of the events and make a name for herself. Now, nearly 19 years later, Helen Scofield meets with Maureen's daughter Caroline to clear the air and salve her own conscience. Shreve makes a pertinent point here about journalistic ethics and how news is swayed by the mores of the day, although her message might have been stronger if Scofield seemed more sympathetic--she's a real stiff. But the heart of the story is all Maureen's, and it carries us, with every beat, to its haunting--and inevitable--conclusion. Murder with a Message. In Shreve's hands it's both believable and unthinkable--and totally absorbing. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
A superbly crafted, intelligently written exploration of the complicities of an abusive relationship. A middle-aged, successful writer, whose career was made after she wrote a tantalizingly slanted article about an abused woman who murdered her husband, is compelled to visit the woman's daughter years later and to give the daughter all the notes from the story, many of them written by the murderer herself. As the daughter, Christine, begins to read, so do we, and the story of Maureen English's torment unfolds with a journalistic intensity. In alternating chapters, author Shreve presents interviews with the citizens of the small New England town where Maureen tried to hide from her husband, as well as Maureen's version of the events. The many voices are impressively distinct, and the points of view are always honestly presented. Hovering over the whole is the question of a journalist's integrity in piecing together the shattered bits of any story. This novel is as forcefully true in its depicting of a "real" situation in fiction as Susan Brownmiller's Waverly Place was in fictionalizing a true story. Highly recommended. ~--Eloise Kinney
