Sea Glass: A Novel

I generally quite like Anita Shreve's novels, but, alas, I am detecting several recurring motifs in them: unhappy marriage, discontented wife, indifferent even sometimes cruel husband, sexy (apparently) unavailable man, yada yada yada. I never really warmed up to the wife and hated the ending of this story. Too bad. I was hoping for a more satisfying summer read. I'll probably continue to read her books, but I still think the best is "Fortune's Rocks."

A story of love and loss told during the time of union organization of Northern textile mills and the Stock Market crash of 1929. Honora Willard is a bank teller when one day a persuasive salesman approaches her window for a transaction and her life takes a dramatic turn. Sexton Beecher is the quintessential salesman, quick, slick and sure of himself to a fault. He sweeps Honora off her feet and within a few months they are married. Sexton takes Honora to live in an abandoned sea cottage outside a New England mill town. Her days are spent homemaking and walking the beach collecting bits of sea glass. All seems idyllic until the economic catastrophe that marked the beginning of the Great Depression. Sexton's livelihood is threatened, as is the stability of his ability to continue paying the mortgage on their home, which mortgage he has procured through less than honest means. Then there's the other part of the story: the unrest developing in the Beecher's small town due to the horrific standards by which the mill owners run their business, treating their employees like virtual slaves. This was an entertaining read. My biggest quibble is with the abrupt ending. Seems the author could have come up with something just as dramatic without leaving the reader feeling such a loss at the end...not the loss depicted in the story, but the loss of the story itself.

The historical significance is important to share widely and would make a great movie. Sometimes we forget where we have come from as a society, and it’s incredibly important in order to appreciate what we have now and God forbid we move backwards.The characters and place were darn so real, I just loved feeling I was at the beach, yet the personal and political drama was very real and I couldn’t stop reading!

At first, Anita Shreve's latest novel had me shaking my head in frustration. I couldn't discern among the many short chapters and their main characters, all seemingly unrelated. I found myself flipping back and forth between chapters to remind myself of who was who. And then something miraculous began to happen: the characters began to cross paths, one by one, and their wildly different lives started to converge. The plot unexpectedly had structure and direction. By the time I reached the end, I was amazed by Shreve's fictive abilities to take a quiet group of character studies to such an explosive conclusion.Set in a New Hampshire mill town and the nearby coast just before and during the Great Depression, the novel follows several principals affected by the greed of the mill owners. This is typical Shreve territory described in her characteristic starkly beautiful prose. Impatient readers might give up on Shreve's painstaking preparation for the final half of the novel, but the rewards are worth the slow start.Men might find this title more hospitable than other Shreve titles; her male characters here are strongly drawn and interesting. Although the women tend to be the unbreakable sea glass, the men drive the plot.I recommend this book for readers of literary fiction and reading groups, the last because Shreve offers history, metaphor, and multidimensional issues - much to talk about. Pass on this if you are in the mood for a page-turner.

The characters are flat but the historical context of the story is decent. Not highly recommended unless you like depression stories.

The first book I read by Anita Shreve was the Pilot's Wife (Ophra Book Club Book) and loved it. I wanted to go back and read some of Anita's earlier books and started with the year 2002 which was this book. I'm not much of a history buff so some of the material in the middle of the book I didn't really care for but I did like how she started the book with the main 5-6 characters individually and then as time moves on they all merge together. I loved the friendship between Honora and Vivian and wish something different would have happened between Honora and McDermott. Overall the book was ok and I'm looking forward to the next book I read of Anita's.

I thoroughly enjoy reading books by Anita Shreve. At times it was difficult to read about the hardship during this time period. Alphonse was one of my favorite characters as well as Honora and many others. A great read!!Angeline

I was addicted to this book from the beginning. This author has a unique way of intertwining characters and not being obvious about how they will all affect each others lives. I usually "catch on" when this kind of writing is done in a book. Anita Shreve had me guessing until the ending which not only suprised me but filled me with emotion. I was intrigued with the marriage of Honora and Sexton. When the husband was faced with adversity his reaction caught me off guard. I also liked the character of Vivian. She was a hoot! She can only be described as a smart, sexy. eccentric you just have to love. This book got me "hooked" and I am going to read more that she has written.

Shreve returns in this novel to the house in Ely Falls where Olympia Biddeford lived in 'Fortune's Rocks'. Thirty years and more have passed, Olympia and John have gone (where to we never know - surely the likelihood would be that Olympia at least would still be alive?) and the house is now being rented by Sexton Beecher, a travelling typewriter salesman, and his young bride Honora, a former bank teller who married out of a desperation to escape her dull working life. It seems implausible that someone like Sexton should be able to rent a house described in 'Fortune's Rocks' as huge, but he not only does this, but decides with the help of a hefty mortgage to buy it. Unfortunately the year is 1929, Wall Street crashes just after Sexton's taken on the mortgage, and the couple are soon in serious trouble, particularly as Sexton loses his job. (This isn't a spoiler, we learn it fairly early on). For Honora, the Crash is both bad news (she realizes that she doesn't actually like her husband all that much, and she's desperately short of money) and good (rather than spend her days wandering the beach gathering sea glass as before, she befriends Vivien, a socialite playwright living nearby, and devotes herself to economizing on household things). Sexton eventually gets a job working at the Ely Fall Mills (which Shreve described in great detail in 'Fortune's Rocks'). Conditions are as awful in the mills as they were in that novel, and Sexton is soon part of a group of men planning to strike in protest. The strike brings Honora great joy - particularly in her friendship with Alphonse, a French boy working in the mills, and in her growing closeness to Quillen McDermott, a heroic and plain-speaking factory worker - but also shows her quite how unreliable Sexton is, and leads her and those closest to her into terrible danger...As always, Shreve's research is immaculate, and she gives a powerful sense of the euphoria at the start of the strike, and the growing anxieties as things go less and less the men's way. However, I found the characters in this book harder to warm to than any in Shreve's other novels (apart from 'All He Ever Wanted', which I didn't enjoy hugely). Honora is rather bland and two-dimensional and I found it hard to understand both what drew her and McDermott together, and why she married Sexton, who was clearly a nasty piece of work. Vivien was a caricature of the 'brilliant socialite with a heart of gold', and Shreve never explained how she got into playwriting, not common for a woman of this background. With the exceptions of McDermott, Alphonse and the Communist Louis, all the mill hands tended to blur rather into one. Alphonse and McDermott were excellent creations, and I really warmed to them and wanted to read more about their friendship - but Shreve's rapid shift between narrators meant we never got quite enough of either of them. The novel also suffered from an extremely leisurely beginning (scene after scene of Honora wandering the beach or baking, and rambling conversations between her and Sexton) which meant that the whole Honora/McDermott side of the plot felt a bit rushed.There is a lot to enjoy in this book, but somehow I couldn't get involved with most of the characters (particularly the women) in the same way that I did with 'Fortune's Rocks'. Ultimately, despite the drama of the mill strike, I found the book as a whole slightly boring. Still, definitely worth a read (it's quite a quick one), particularly for big Shreve fans.

This is one that f the four novels set around the same house but at different times in history. This is a story of a marriage and centres around the Depression and prohibition. I loved it. Sea glass is the’jewels’ foundon the beach, bits of broken glass tumbled by the sea, shaped by the sand.

This is such an enjoyable book with characters and descriptions the reader can easily visualise. The focus is on five main characters and their contrasting feelings set within an interesting storyline about events in the 1920s surrounding the Great Depression. A book that has made me rediscover my enjoyment of reading.

Story of how the lives of ordinary working people were hit by the American depression of the 20’s and 30’s. Not at all heavy, very human and moving and like all Shreve’s work utterly engrossing

Loved this book. Its the second story I've read by this author and I'm totally impressed. So refreshing to find a writer who doesn't churn out cheap pulp.