Last week, Jen read “Eat Pray Love,” a personal memoir by Elizabeth Gilbert about self-discovery. This week she investigates Gilbert’s first foray into fiction and comes out smiling, concluding, “Each page was a genuine pleasure.” Praise doesn’t come much higher than that so this novel goes straight onto our “Must Read” list.
This is a really great book. It was fun. It was smart. It was uplifting and downright entertaining. I read Eat Pray Love last week and was rabid to get my hands on another book of Liz Gilbert’s. I had no idea what she would be like as a fiction writer and was so pleased to find that she is just as good as when she is writing a memoir.
Stern Men is about two small islands off the coast of Maine. It is about the people who live there. The fishermen and the land owners. The historical background of these people and the fight over money and turf.
It is about one woman, Ruth Thomas, who has the power to change everything.
The dialogue is marvelously real and clever. The characters are so vivid and so likable that even the awful ones feel like people who might be worth meeting. The likable ones are a marvel. Liz Gilbert is a master of the funny smart-mouth character. They just come alive under her pen.
As Ruth grows, her relationship to the other islanders deepens and grows. She has ties to the families involved in both sides of the “lobster war” and only she can ultimately end it. She stays true to herself but the manipulating factors that control her life run deep and even she is surprised by how far sighted they are. There is more than we and she see.
Liz really has a mastery of glorifying the obvious and there are more roads to a happy ending than we predict.
The fate of Courne Haven and Fort Niles is held in our hands and I loved reading every minute of it. Each page was a genuine pleasure. The end gets there too fast but despite its abruptness we are pleased.