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Summary
Summary
New York Times bestselling author A. Manette Ansay delivers the unforgettable story of two families united by tragedy -- and one woman's deeply emotional journey toward a choice she'd never thought possible
On an ordinary morning in Fox Harbor, Wisconsin, Meg and Rex Van Dorn's lives are irrevocably changed when a drunk driver slams into Meg's car, killing the couple's six-year-old son, Evan. In a town in which everyone knows everybody else, it's no surprise that Meg and the driver, Cindy Ann Kreisler, were once the best of friends. Now, as Meg recovers from her own injuries, she and Rex find themselves unable to cope with their anger and despair, especially after Cindy Ann returns -- with a mere slap on the wrist -- to the life she lived before the accident: living in a beautiful house, enjoying her own three daughters, all of whom walked away from the accident unharmed.
Mornings, we woke with an ache in our throats, a sourness in our stomachs, that had nothing to do with Evan. The truth was that, with each passing month, he was harder to remember, harder to see. I felt as if I were grasping at the color of water, the color of the wind or the sky. And this only made me angrier. My mind returned, again and again, to Cindy Ann, to what she'd done. When I passed Evan's room, the closed door like a fist, I thought about how Cindy Ann had destroyed us. When I saw other people's children, I promised myself that someday, Cindy Ann would pay.
In their rage and grief, Meg and Rex buy a boat to sail around the world, hoping to put as much distance between themselves and Cindy Ann Kreisler as possible. Adrift in the company of other live-board cruisers, Meg tries to believe that she and Rex have left their bitterness behind. But when she returns to Fox Harbor for her older brother's wedding, she is forced to face the complex ties that bind her to the woman who has wounded her so badly. For, as Meg knows better than anyone, Cindy Ann has secrets and sorrows of her own, dating back to the summer of their friendship.
Impassioned, insightful, and beautifully written, Blue Water is the story of people learning to face the unthinkable -- a compelling affirmation of the human potential for forgiveness, redemption, and grace.
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
In Vinegar Hill author Ansay's latest, a probing character study, Meg Van Dorn and her husband, Rex, struggle with the loss of six-year-old son, Evan, in a crash with Cindy Ann Kreisler-Meg's best friend from high school and an alcoholic, who was drunk at the wheel. The two file a civil suit that would financially ruin the well-off Cindy Ann, but Meg has a change of heart, given the impending marriage of Meg's older brother to Cindy Ann's sister; it's more a contrived plot device than a genuine narrative event, but it does force Meg to constantly shift her perspective on the tragedy, especially as Ansay offers a sympathetic sketch of Cindy Ann and her troubled past. Most of Meg's emotional cycling takes place on the Atlantic coast, where she and Rex have gone sailing as a coping strategy and have fallen in with various strands of lower-end sailing culture: the book's best energy is spent in places like the Island Girls bar, to which Meg eventfully repairs one night without Rex. The resolution of Meg and Rex's marital issues seems glaringly underwritten in the final chapters, but on the whole, this is a solid and revelatory novel on themes of grief and loss. (On sale Apr. 25) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
As revealed in her memoir, Limbo (2001), Oprah author Ansay is no stranger to inexplicable suffering, and her understanding of pain and stoicism shapes her finely crafted books. Her fifth novel is a perfectly pitched, impossible--to-set-down tale of the consequences of the death of a child. Megan loses her miracle son in a car accident caused by a woman she was friends with back in high school, Cindy Ann, now a divorced mother with a drinking problem. Demoralized by the lawsuits they've brought against Cindy Ann and unable to resume their old lives, Megan and her husband set off on a sailboat for ports unknown. Ansay also avoids the predictable and heads into the mythic with dramatic revelations of the wildness of the ocean and the human psyche as she portrays a sisterhood of women at sea nursing secret sorrows, and charts a cathartic reconciliation as two grieving families try to regain their spiritual bearings. Ansay's story of loss becomes a saga of transformation as rage, guilt, and bottomless anguish are converted into kindness, compassion, and forgiveness. --Donna Seaman Copyright 2006 Booklist
Kirkus Review
A soft-spoken, unenergetic narrative of grief, anger and forgiveness. Megan Van Dorn, nearing her 50s, has found fulfillment in late motherhood; life in her Midwestern suburb is good, and she even seems to enjoy spending hours in an ergonomic chair in an accounting office. Then tragedy strikes: Her bright, pleasant son is killed in an automobile accident. The offending driver is Megan's childhood friend Cindy Ann Kreisler, who, it seems, has a drinking problem but who manages to avoid a Breathalyzer test until a couple of hours after the crash, and even then "her blood alcohol level . . . was barely within Wisconsin's legal limit." In depicting all this, novelist and memoirist Ansay (Limbo, 2001, etc.) is matter-of-fact, at a seeming remove from her characters. When Cindy Ann is acquitted with a slap-on-the-wrist punishment, Megan finds herself "terrible in my anger: strong, and fierce, and righteous. I could have led an army"; yet the reader doesn't ever feel much of this anger, for Megan's narration is flat and without affect, and her discovery of "the sheer cathartic power of . . . rage" is evidenced mostly by the fact that she sets a lawyer loose on Cindy Ann while she and her near-perfect husband, Rex, fulfill his dream of setting sail to the Caribbean. A year passes, and Megan, who returns home from time to time to attend to household matters, finds her rage slowly dissipating at the sight of poor Cindy Ann, who has hit rock-bottom and seems not to know how to climb up again. What to do? Well, Rex has taken to hitting the bottle himself, and to his irritation, Megan acts on that sense of pity, all of which has--well, consequences. Effective at moments. But, for the most part, the telling is long and the showing short; not much happens, and when it does, it seldom moves. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Ansay takes us on the dark, emotional journey of a mother's losing a child and brings us out on the other side into forgiveness and redemption. Meg and Rex Van Dorn's comfortable life in Meg's home town on the Wisconsin shore of Lake Michigan ends when their young son is killed in a car accident as Meg is driving him to school. Cindy Ann, the driver who caused the accident, was Meg's best friend in high school. Meg and Rex file a civil suit against Cindy but drop it when they find that bitterness is dominating their lives. Trying to start over, they buy a sailboat and move to the Caribbean. Their seafaring life, which Ansay depicts authentically in all its drudgery and danger, seems exotic but offers them little comfort. In time, Meg's feelings about Cindy evolve into something like a supernatural connection. When she learns that Rex is secretly pursuing the civil suit, the differences in how they cope with grief begin to pull their marriage apart. For all popular fiction collections; buy to please the many fans of Ansay's Oprah selection, Vinegar Hill.-Reba Leiding, James Madison Univ. Libs., Harrisonburg, VA (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
Blue Water A Novel Chapter One Forget what you've read about the ocean. Forget white sails on a blue horizon, the romance of it, the beauty. A picnic basket in a quiet anchorage, the black-tipped flash of gulls. The sound of the wind like a pleasant song, the curved spine of the coast -- -- no. Such images belong to shore. They have nothing whatsoever to do with the sea. Imagine a place of infinite absence. An empty ballroom, the colors muted, the edges lost in haze. The sort of dream you have when you've gone beyond exhaustion to a strange, otherworldly country, a place I'd visited once before in the months that followed the birth of my son, when days and nights blurred into a single lost cry, when I'd find myself standing over the crib, or rocking him, breathing the musk of his hair, or lying in bed beside Rex's dark shape, unable to recall how I'd gotten there. As if I'd been plucked out of one life and dropped, wriggling and whole, into another. Day after day, week after week, the lack of sleep takes its toll. You begin to see things that may or may not be there. You understand how the sailors of old so willingly met their deaths on the rocks, believing in visions of beautiful women, sirens, mermaids with long, sparkling hair. The crest of a wave becomes a human face, openmouthed, white-eyed, astonished. The spark of a headlight appears in the sky, edges closer, fades, edges closer still. There's a motion off the bow, and I clutch at the helm, catch myself thinking, Turn! But, eventually, I learn to let my eyes fall out of focus. Blink, look again. Wipe my sweating face. There is nothing out there but gray waves, gray waves. Clouds. A translucent slice of moon. Space. We alternated watches, Rex and I: four hours on, four hours off. We had a ship's clock that rang out the hours. We had charts and a sextant, a handheld GPS. We had an outdated radar system; we had a small refrigerator, a water maker, clothing and books sealed in plastic wrap. We had five hundred pounds of canned goods, nuts, dried fruit and beans, powdered milk. We had a ship's log, where we jotted down notes: latitude and longitude, course and speed, wind direction, weather, unusual observations. We had a float plan, which we left with my brother, Toby; he posted it in the fish store, on the bulletin board behind the cash -register. People stopped by with farewell gifts: cookies sealed in Tupperware, a book of crossword puzzles, religious cards, funny cards, cards simply wishing us well. Everyone in Fox Harbor knew why we were leaving, of course, and this was another reason why I'd agreed to rent our house and move onto the sailboat Rex had bought in Portland, Maine. Our first destination was Bermuda, our ETA three to five weeks. From Bermuda, we'd continue southeast to the Bahamas, island-hop down to the Caicos. Perhaps we'd -winter over in Puerto Rico. Or perhaps we'd cross the ocean to Portugal -- who could say? We might even head to Panama, pass through the canal, find our way north along the coast to the Mexican Bajas. So much depended on weather, on wind. On our own day-to-day inclinations. The plan, Rex liked to tell people, is not to have a plan. It had always been Rex's dream to live aboard a sailboat, and Chelone was exactly the boat that he had wanted. A blue water boat, he called her. A boat built to sail around the world. He'd grown up on Cape Cod, sailing with his father; at twenty, he was captain of his college sailing team, and before heading west to Madison for law school, he'd worked as a mate aboard a private schooner, cruising the Virgin Islands. On cold winter nights as we lay in bed, listening to the east wind screaming off Lake Michigan, he'd tell me about the islands he'd seen, casuarina trees and pink sand beaches, sailboats at anchor outside each rustic harbor. Passing these boats, you'd see dogs racing from bow to stern, bicycles lashed to the safety lines, laundry fluttering from the rigging. Entire families spent their whole lives just cruising from place to place, dropping anchor wherever they chose. No bills to pay, no responsibilities. You didn't like your neighbor, no problem, you sailed away. Maybe, he'd whisper, his breath warm against my neck, we could do the same thing someday. I like our neighbors fine, Rex. Seriously. I am serious. At the time, I couldn't imagine saying good-bye to Toby, to my friends at the accounting firm where I worked, to our fieldstone house overlooking the lake, to the small, Wisconsin town where I'd been raised. Still, after years spent trying to conceive a child, after the shots and surgeries, the herbal teas, the special masses; after trying to adopt the infant of a teenage girl who changed her mind, I started to pay more attention whenever Rex talked about heading to sea. I leafed through his copies of Practical Sailor , his scrapbook of sail plans and hull designs. I studied the glossy brochures he -received from boat builders around the world. I'd always enjoyed sailing, and though I'd only sailed on the Great Lakes, I figured that the ocean couldn't be all that different. Water was water, after all. You wore a life jacket. You learned to hang on. Then, one week before my fortieth birthday, I discovered I was pregnant with Evan. After eleven years of marriage, we were -finally -- unexpectedly -- about to have a child. Our plans no longer belonged to us, and the truth was that we gave them up eagerly. We wanted to make sacrifices. We wanted to shake our heads ruefully, saying, But then we had the baby so we couldn't . . . Six years later, our lives changed again, when Evan was killed in a car accident involving someone I'd known since grade school. Someone whose birthday parties I'd attended. . . . Blue Water A Novel . Copyright © by A. Ansay. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold. Excerpted from Blue Water by A. Manette Ansay All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
