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Summary
Summary
INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER
From the New York Times best-selling author of The Weight of Water and The Pilot's Wife (an Oprah's Book Club selection): an exquisitely suspenseful new novel about an extraordinary young woman tested by a catastrophic event and its devastating aftermath--based on the true story of the largest fire in Maine's history
In October 1947, after a summer long drought, fires break out all along the Maine coast from Bar Harbor to Kittery and are soon racing out of control from town to village. Five months pregnant, Grace Holland is left alone to protect her two toddlers when her husband, Gene, joins the volunteer firefighters. Along with her best friend, Rosie, and Rosie's two young children, Grace watches helplessly as their houses burn to the ground, the flames finally forcing them all into the ocean as a last resort. The women spend the night frantically protecting their children, and in the morning find their lives forever changed: homeless, penniless, awaiting news of their husbands' fate, and left to face an uncertain future in a town that no longer exists. In the midst of this devastating loss, Grace discovers glorious new freedoms--joys and triumphs she could never have expected her narrow life with Gene could contain--and her spirit soars. And then the unthinkable happens--and Grace's bravery is tested as never before.
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 (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Stuck in a loveless and uncommunicative marriage with her husband, Gene, young housewife and mother Grace Holland has resigned herself to a future of childcare and housework. It's just after World War II, and there aren't many other opportunities for married women in coastal Maine. But when, after a summer-long drought, a massive fire breaks out and threatens her home and community, Grace may have an unexpected chance not only to rebuild but also to rewrite her personal narrative. Shreve (Stella Bain) writes with fondness of the coastal New England landscape, and she provides plenty of vintage details to evoke postwar life. Characterizations, however, are less convincing; Gene's cruelty to Grace seems disproportionate to its purported rationale, and the novel's final pages feel implausible and anachronistic, even given Grace's newfound self-reliance. Nevertheless, many readers will be buoyed by Grace's strength and resourcefulness and will be eager to debate the ethical decisions she makes as she seizes her independence. 200,000-copy announced first printing. (Apr.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
Shreve's latest takes on natural disasters, public and private.The summer of 1947 was unseasonably hot, leading to a drought that had devastating consequences for the state of Maine. Shreve's novel tells the story of the Great Fires of Maine from the perspective of Grace, a housewife living near the coast. Grace faces a drought of a different kind, in her marriage. Husband Gene, a surveyor, never talks about the war experiences that left him with inner and outer scars, but "the other husbands don't either." What is unusual, at least compared to how Grace's neighbor Rosie describes her love life, is how brutal Gene can be in bed. With two children under 2 and another on the way, Grace's domestic arrangements are increasingly stressed as blistering summer advances. By October, the entire state is a tinderbox; even a dropped cigarette can set a parched lawn ablaze. As wildfires threaten, Gene leaves with a crew of men to dig a fire break. Awakened in the middle of the night, Grace realizes her town is burning. She flees to the seashore with her children and the clothes on her back and spends the night along with Rosie and many others huddled under soaked blankets. After rescue comes, Grace's baby is stillborn. Now homeless, with the children and her mother in tow, Grace moves into a vacant beach-side mansion which, she thinks, was left to Gene by his late mother, Merle. Except that Gene has been declared missing, and the mansion is not unoccupied: Aidan, an Irish pianist, has been squatting there since the fire disrupted his concert tour. Gene's absence seems downright salutary. A brief affair with Aidan shows her what Rosie was talking about, and he resumes his tour, promising to return. All the contentedness stalls the novel, until Shreve shakes things up in a way that descends into woman-in-jeopardy territory. The back stories of the main characters are so sketchy that their actions seem unmotivated and arbitrary. Formulaic plot aside, worth reading for the period detail and the evocative prose. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
After the wettest spring in memory, the summer of 1947 is dry and scorching in coastal Maine. Grace welcomes the long days that allow her to get out with her two young children, but at home, they only heighten the turbulence in her struggling marriage. Life changes overnight when wildfires sweep down the coast, destroying everything in their path. Through a terror-filled night, Grace manages to save herself and her children, but by morning, their home is gone and her husband is missing. With little education or job experience, Grace takes a risk by moving her family to a new town and taking work where she can find it. She thrives in her new surroundings, but rebuilding one's life does not mean that the past won't find you. Though the characters lack dimension, best-selling Shreve's (Stella Bain, 2013) portrayal of a community in a natural disaster is on point, and Grace's self-discovery in her time of need is genuine. Ultimately, this is a suspenseful and heartwarming story of not just overcoming but also growing in the face of great difficulty. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: A robust print run, avid publicity, and an author tour will drum up interest in Shreve's latest page-turner.--Ophoff, Cortney Copyright 2017 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
IN OCTOBER 1947 more than 200,000 acres of Maine burned, including half of Acadia National Park. Nine towns were destroyed. The disaster was a myth in the making, a series of events sufficiently violent to feed anyone's dark imagination, where it could emerge as one giant, terrifying fireball, with Maine as the unfortunate target. In truth, though, these were fires plural, 200 of them, erupting almost as if timed but fed by what can only be considered bad timing: drought, unusually high winds, random carelessness. Maine was a birthday cake, lit everywhere. Forest fires became town fires, even coastal fires, with some people forced to the ocean's edge. In Bar Harbor, they were evacuated by fishing boats. The historical record of their travails is a literary opportunist's delight; it's surprising it took a novelist this long to pounce. Anita Shreve's "The Stars Are Fire" is the swiftly paced if occasionally soppy saga of a young mother, Grace Holland, who loses her home and nearly her life that October. The so-called Great Fires are a good fit for Shreve, who has repurposed Maine history before to best-selling effect in "The Weight of Water," where she gave a fictional spin (and twist) to an 1873 double homicide on Smuttynose Island. (Kathryn Bigelow directed an adaptation, a mystifying stinker of a film.) When "The Stars Are Fire" begins in a rainy spring, Grace is only 23 and already has two children with her husband, Gene, a surveyor working on the new Maine Ttirnpike. They live in a place Shreve calls Hunts Beach, which from all the geographic clues sounds very close to Fortune's Rocks, the setting for four of her previous novels. The emotional territory is familiar as well. Grace doesn't have an ideal marriage. As she reminds herself, Gene is handsome, a good provider and "enthralled" with their son and daughter. But he's either a clumsy, rough lover or, as his wife suspects, "deeply troubled." Neither Grace nor Shreve seems to have decided which that might be; he's a boogeyman trotted out for convenience. Shreve wastes little time getting to the fire itself, which arrives as a reddish glow on the western horizon before the end of the book's first quarter. It's a dynamic, vivid scene. While Grace rushes to the beach to take cover with her best friend and their children, Gene is last seen walking into a wall of flames. The question of his fate remains open for much of the book, which says little for his wife's desire to find him, or the investigative talents of the fictional Maine police force. Grace is rendered homeless, as were 2,500 Mainers after that October, but arguably she gains from the fire as well - the freedom to pursue a career and new romantic prospects. This is how Shreve, reliably a romantically inclined writer, rolls. A heel of a man is barely out of the picture when a better man shows up, first to help and then to woo. In "The Pilot's Wife," a woman learns of her treacherous husband's death from the man who becomes her next lover. In "The Stars Are Fire," Grace is rescued, post-fire, by a highly eligible doctor. Then she encounters a soulful pianist, a man she finds squatting at her recently deceased mother-in-law's stillstanding, palatial shorefront house. Hearing him play for the first time, Grace muses, "Is it from musical notes that true longing is born?" How much you enjoy this book may depend on whether you can answer that question in the affirmative. If life were anything like a Shreve novel, Match.com would be a website selling the wooden sticks to light fires with. But how the pages turn, even the ones padded with Grace's not entirely believable ambivalence over matters large and small. She's an enterprising woman, sensible, a true Yankee. (Of her laundry, she observes, "A soft towel is a coddle, doesn't get the dead skin off.") Would she really be reluctant, in this crisis, to help herself to her deceased mother-in-law's possessions? Gene is (or was) the woman's only son! Every reluctant dip into the dead lady's closet feels like an achievement in independence. Shreve has a gift for making the mundane engaging; Grace's excursion to Biddeford to look for a used car is nearly as interesting as her romantic life. Long before Liane Moriarty was spinning her "Big Little Lies," Shreve was spicing up domestic doings in beachfront settings with terrible husbands and third-act twists. She still is, as effectively as ever, this time with a narrative literally lit from within. The historical record of Maine's Great Fires is a literary opportunist's delight. MARY POLS, a reporter for The Portland Press Herald in Maine, is the author of a memoir, "Accidentally on Purpose."
Library Journal Review
Shreve's (Stella Bain) latest brings readers to 1947 coastal Maine. In a close-knit town, Grace Holland, a young mother of two, enjoys camaraderie with her neighbor Rosie. She feels herself relax into discussions with Rosie that she can't have with her taciturn husband or her loving but rather rigid mother. In a time when the only advance warning for fire is the smell of smoke, residents prepare ahead of time. Grace wakes to the sound of her daughter coughing, bundles her children into the baby carriage, and carries them to the beach, where she thinks quickly enough to prepare protective wet air pockets from blankets, ordering Rosie to do the same. As the town burns around her, Grace rises to handle each astonishing ordeal as she meets it. VERDICT Based on the harrowing true story of the largest fire to ravage the coast of Maine, this is sure to be a best seller. Shreve's prose mirrors the action of the fire, with popping embers of action, licks of blazing rage, and the slow burn of lyrical character development. Absolutely stunning. [See Prepub Alert, 11/16/16; "Editors' Spring Picks," LJ 2/15/17.]- Julie Kane, Washingrton & Lee Lib., Lexington, VA © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.