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Summary
Summary
Journeying to Smuttynose Island, off the coast of New Hampshire, to shoot a photo essay about a century-old double murder, a photographer becomes absorbed by the crime and increasingly obsessed with jealousy over the idea that her husband is having an affair.
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 (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
In 1873, two women living on the Isles of Shoals, a lonely, windswept group of islands off the coast of New Hampshire, were brutally murdered. A third woman survived, cowering in a sea cave until dawn. More than a century later, Jean, a magazine photographer working on a photoessay about the murders, returns to the Isles with her husband, Thomas, and their five-year-old daughter, Billie, aboard a boat skippered by her brother-in-law, Rich, who has brought along his girlfriend, Adaline. As Jean becomes immersed in the details of the 19th-century murders, Thomas and Adaline find themselves drawn together-with potentially ruinous consequences. Shreve (Where or When; Resistance) perfectly captures the ubiquitous dampness of life on a sailboat, deftly evoking the way in which the weather comes to dictate all actions for those at sea. With the skill of a master shipbuilder, Shreve carefully fits her two stories together, tacking back and forth between the increasingly twisted murder mystery and the escalating tensions unleashed by the threat of a dangerous shipboard romance. Written with assurance and grace, plangent with foreboding and a taut sense of inexorability, The Weight of Water is a powerfully compelling tale of passion, a provocative and disturbing meditation on the nature of love. Author tour. (Jan.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
Though she fumbles slightly at the close, Shreve (Resistance, 1995, etc.) deftly juxtaposes a strained modern marriage and a century-old double murder. Jean is assigned to take photographs for a magazine piece about an ancient crime on the granite island of Smuttynose, off the coast of Portsmouth, New Hampshire. She makes the journey to the island by sailboat, sharing the claustrophobic quarters with her five-year-old daughter Billie, her high-strung poet husband Thomas, his brother Rich, and Rich's girlfriend of a few months, Adaline. In 1873, two women were hacked to death on the island, and a third, apparently a survivor of the attack, was found hiding in a remote cave; a Prussian itinerant was convicted of the killings. In an uncatalogued archive in Portsmouth, Jean finds a pencil-written translation of the diary kept by Maren, the woman who survived, and, in a fit of pique caused by seeing her husband engrossed in conversation with attractive Adaline, she pockets it. And thus two dramas unspool side by side: On board, Jean focuses on the easy interaction between her husband and Rich's girlfriend and muses on the estrangement in her marriage. Maren's diary, meanwhile, describes her childhood in Norway and her incestuous love for her brother Evan. Married off to a taciturn fisherman, Maren settles on desolate Smuttynose, soon to be joined by her bad-tempered sister Karen and, later, by Evan and his new wife Anethe. Tortured by jealousy, Maren dutifully maintains her remote household, until, the diary tells us, her long-repressed rage is unleashed. It was, it turns out, Maren who killed Karen and Anethe. In present time, Jean ventures some betrayals of her own, and the small sailboat gets caught in a ferocious storm. The ensuing death at sea, however, feels unnecessary--a sort of cheap shot ending. The emotional losses depicted in the parallel stories are ultimately more haunting. Nonetheless, a highly readable yarn and a complex, convincing exploration of the ramifications of jealousy. (Author tour)
Booklist Review
Shreve, an award-winning author of fiction and nonfiction, has crafted a tour de force that will beguile readers with its depth, passion, and power. Jean a professional photographer, is hired to shoot a photo-essay about a tragic murder that took place in 1873 on Smuttynose Island, off the New Hampshire coast. Two women were brutally hacked to death, and a third barely survived to identify the killer, who was hanged for the crime. Jean persuades her husband, her five-year-old daughter, her brother-in-law, and his girlfriend to accompany her to Smuttynose to photograph the house where the murder was committed. She soon becomes completely absorbed by the sensational case, learning from trial records, newspaper clippings, and the victims' personal journals how the murder wreaked emotional havoc, shattered lives, and destroyed a family forever. But a parallel tragedy, horrifyingly similar to the one in 1873, is about to occur. Just as the murder survivor found that a single moment changed her life forever, so Jean finds that a single action alters everything for her. Shreve's story is at once powerfully affecting and indescribably sorrowful, exploring the tenuous nature of happiness, the frailty of the human psyche, and the catastrophe of unthinking impulse. A masterfully written, riveting must-have for all collections. --Emily Melton
Library Journal Review
In Shreve's latest, a woman who investigates a century-old murder of passion (on the fabulously named Smuttynose Island) finds her own life subtly influenced by those past events. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.