Hester Prynne never had it so good! The year is 1899, and Olympia Biddeford, the headstrong daughter of a Boston Brahmin family, has decided to test the limits of her cloistered world. Spending the summer at her father's New Hampshire estate, the teenage heroine of Fortune's Rocks is entranced with the visiting salon of artists, writers, and lawyers. She's especially captivated, however, by John Haskell, a charismatic physician who ministers to the blue-collar community in the nearby mill towns. This middle-aged Good Samaritan hires Olympia to assist him as a nurse, and their collaboration soon evolves into a fiery love affair. Alas, it's only a matter of weeks before this passionate exercise in managed care is exposed--with disastrous consequences for the young, impregnated heroine. Even her adoring father now considers her "an overplump sixteen-year-old girl whose judgment can no longer be trusted," and insists that she break off her relationship: "There is nothing more to be said on this subject," he says. She bites her lip to keep from crying out further. She holds the arms of her chair so tightly she later will have cramps in her fingers. She will refuse to obey him, she thinks. She will accept his implied challenge and set off on her own. But in the next moment, she asks herself: How will she be able to do that? Without her father's support, she cannot hope to survive. And if she herself does not survive, then a child cannot live." In the end, Anita Shreve's seventh novel is a polished, supremely entertaining variation on Wuthering Heights, with Olympia and Haskell sitting in for Catherine and Heathcliff. The author did some meticulous research for her New England background, which gives this study of one particular wayward woman some extra historical heft. Some readers may find the plot twists a bit pat. And despite Olympia's efforts to be an independent woman, she overcomes her trials largely as a result of her family's wealth and station, which takes the edge off Shreve's feminist message. Still, Fortune's Rocks is a romance in the classic sense of the word, and should be enjoyed as such, unless the reader is absolutely allergic to happy endings. --Ted Leventhal


From Publishers Weekly
The time is the turn of the last century, the setting a rocky New Hampshire coastline resort area nicknamed "Fortune's Rocks." Olympia Biddeford, age 15, is walking the beach, feeling the first stirrings of her womanhood. The strong-willed daughter of an upstanding Boston couple, she soon "learns of desire" as she begins a passionate affair with a married writer, John Haskell, three times her age. From the moment they meet (he is a visiting friend of her father's), they experience a sexual sparkAOlympia feels "liquid" in his presence. Soon, they fall into sinful trysting. Shreve (The Pilot's Wife) serves up these opening events with breathless immediacy. Once the plot gets a chance to developAOlympia gets pregnant, gives up child, fights to get child backAit settles down considerably, turning into a modernized The Scarlet Letter, a tale of a woman attaining feminist independence by living outside her period's societal mores. Reading, Brown (of TV's The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd) clearly has the most fun at the beginning, where the story's real heat and flushed excitement pours out. Listeners, too, may grow colder as the plot loses its torrid, forbidden edge. Based on the 1999 Little, Brown hardcover. (Dec.) Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
Since Shreve's last book (The Pilot's Wife) was an Oprah pick, she's sure to have a winner with this one. But even without Oprah's help, this book is not to be missed. Fortune's Rocks takes Shreve back to her forteAa literary novel set in a historical framework. It worked beautifully in The Weight of Water, and it does here as well. As the year 1899 moves toward 1900, Olympia Biddesford is a 15-year-old on the cusp of womanhood. Spending the summer with her family at Fortune's Rocks, a New Hampshire coastal community, she meets John Haskell, an esteemed friend of her father. Though John has a wife and four children, he and Olympia are instant soulmates. Their intense affair creates complete havoc in both of their lives. A few weeks of joy turn into years of pain and redemption, culminating in a tense, page-turning trial at the end of the book. Shreve's writing is just complex and meaty enough to portray the time period perfectly, and it's a beautifully told story. Order multiple copies, and put yourself on the holds list! This will fly off the shelves.-ABeth Gibbs, P.L. of Charlotte & Mecklenburg Cty., NC Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.


The New York Times Book Review, Alberto Mobilio
...a slickly made confection for readers who want to laugh and cry at the noble struggle of the human heart and to feel that they too have struggled just a little, maybe trying to get a handle on the oddly cast prose.


Washington Post Book World, 7/2/00
"...an ideal book to read while listening...to the waves in a summer's night...Shreve is a skilled storyteller with an uncanny eye for detail...full of heartwrenching suspense..."


USA Today 11/24/99
"No praise is too high for Fortune's Rocks. The book will take hold of you and not let you go until the last word."


From AudioFile
The summer Olivia Biddeford turns 16 starts with the small pleasures of the seashore and ends with tumultuous events of scandal and disgrace. The Biddefords' turn-of-the-century world of scholarship and privilege is fluidly depicted by Blair Brown's narration. Her voice is gentle, yet easily captures Olivia's impetuousness and passion throughout the story. The stylized formality of the period, its customs and speech seem natural and without artifice. Brown's performance isn't overly sentimental and plays to the heart of the story, to Olivia's strength, her independence and its consequences. The production is carefully orchestrated in pace and mood. Side breaks and changes of scene show the expert hand of director Lars Hoel. R.F.W. (c) AudioFile, Portland, Maine


From Booklist
Shreve's last novel, The Pilot's Wife (1998), was an Oprah pick, so her newest work is guaranteed a large and ready audience. A polished and magnetic, if formulaic, storyteller, Shreve takes her readers back to the turn of the last century and deep into the psyche of 15-year-old Olympia Biddeford, the only child of wealthy, cultured, and well-meaning parents. It's summer, and the Biddefords have moved for the season into their New Hampshire seaside cottage, which was once a convent. It faces the treacherous coast, which gives the place (and Shreve's novel) its haunting name, and this setting, just like every other seemingly casual detail, presages the high drama to come. It begins when Olympia suddenly senses that she is no longer a child. Even her father, who has been home-schooling her, detects something different about his smart and beautiful daughter as he instructs her to read a book of socially conscious essays written by Dr. John Haskell, who, along with his wife and children, will be their dinner guest. Olympia evinces no interest until she and Haskell--41, handsome, and intense--come face-to-face and are shot through with that awful current that signals love-at-first-sight. Their reckless affair precipitates a scandal of immense proportions, resulting in a harrowing separation and pregnancy. As sexy as their taboo liaisons are, Shreve is just as compelling in her descriptions of Olympia's solitary suffering in their aftermath, and in the rousing courtroom scenes that pave the way for a morally triumphant happy ending. This is exceptionally fine entertainment. Donna Seaman


From Kirkus Reviews
Shreves seventh novel (Pilots Wife, 1998, etc.) is a pleasantly atmospheric fin-de-sicle tale of high-society adultery, in which love ultimately triumphs for a gorgeously written heroine who seems to belong in a different century. At a time when women dont show their ankles in public, Olympia Biddeford embarks on a summer 1899 idyll on the New Hampshire shore. With grace and understatement, Shreve evokes 15-year-old Olympias emerging sexuality, her family cottage on Fortunes Rocks, and the bright, sea-clean season. The perfect complement to the heroine's enchanted world is Dr. John Haskell, a physician and writer who provides care to the poor of a nearby mill town. Despite his wife and children, Haskell and Olympia fall in love and are soon caught in flagrante. Disgraced, the Biddeford family leaves Fortunes Rocks for Boston, where Olympia discovers she is pregnant. She gives birth, the child is taken to an orphanage, and Olympia is exiled to a western Massachusetts convent. Olympia eventually returns to the cottage at Fortunes Rocks to rebuild her life. She seeks out and finds her lost son, and files a suit to recover him. The trial (a very '90s concoction, with ethnic and class conflict at its heart) is stirring, and though Olympia winsthe adoptive parents are too grubby to raise the boy correctlyshe refuses the victory when she sees their pain. Haskell returns from his exile in the West, where he has been treating immigrants and Native Americans, to find Olympias love for him still strong. They marry, and, sensing the distant strains of political correctness, convert the cottage into a birthing center for unmarried women. Olympia leaps out in sharp focus from the first page, but the conscientiously tangled plotting and the muddle it provokes in her show the strain of transplanting a millenial sensibility back a hundred years.($200,000 ad/promo; author tour) -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

FROM OUR EDITORS

The Barnes & Noble Review
Little Miss Fortune

Thank heaven for Anita Shreve. The author of the beloved The Weight Of Water, the Oprah-fied The Pilot's Wife, and now, Fortune's Rocks, is one of the few contemporary writers who creates novels — largely for women — that are mainstream enough to appeal to a great number of book buyers and intelligent enough to keep those book buyers from feeling guilty for selling out to commerce. How does she manage it? Usually by melding just the right amount of old-fashioned readability with ripped-from-the-headlines topicality. The Pilot's Wife, for example, tells an age-old story: A woman discovers that her recently deceased husband had had a whole "other life," complete with another wife and child; the topicality was the (rather improbable) fact that the husband was also involved with the headline-grabbing IRA.

In FORTUNE'S ROCKS, Shreve turns historical in venue and ultramodern in attitude. Set at the turn of the century — the 20th century, that is — the story concerns Olympia Biddleford, well-born daughter of an erudite, if rather cold father. The precocious Olympia is the kind of girl who might then have been called high-spirited: She has her own opinions about history and literature, for example, and isn't shy about expressing them — at least within the safety of her family. But Olympia is also high-spirited and provocative in other, more dangerous ways — most notably when she embarks on a sexual relationship with John Haskell, one of her father's friends (and 30 years her senior!). Nothing goodwillcome of this, Olympia and the reader both know from the outset; it doesn't take long — just about a third of the novel, in fact — for this foreboding to be proved right. The lovers are soon discovered, and their lives are torn asunder. Haskell's wife leaves him, the Biddlefords' reputation is seriously besmirched, and Olympia is sent by her omnipotent father to a school "out west."

But the story hardly ends there. Olivia, it turns out, is pregnant with Haskell's child, and though in a drugged postpartum state she allows her son to be taken from her, she soon returns to Fortune's Rocks intent on reclaiming him.

It's at this point that Shreve begins blending the novel's own particular topicality cocktail. Olympia discovers that her son is living with well-meaning but poor French immigrants, and she decides to use her not insignificant fortune and still powerful (if somewhat tarnished) reputation to prove that she, not the Telesphore Bolducs, should have custody of her boy. The problem is, even Olympia can't deny that the Bolducs are loving parents and that the child is happy and well in their care. What follows is a court case and a soul-searching that liberally borrows not only from the biblical tale of King Solomon (who is the better mother — the one who will allow her child to be figuratively cut in half or the one who allows him to live with the other?) but also from pop culture milestones such as the 1979 movie "Kramer vs. Kramer" and the Mary Beth Whitehead surrogate mother trial (remember that one?). The denouement will surprise no careful reader who has noticed the late-20th-century political correctness that runs deep in 19th-century Olympia. Shreve has already shown us her heroine's tendency toward outspokenness; she has also twigged us to her heroine's politics by showing her at work with Haskell at a "women's clinic" where all kinds of women receive a variety of not necessarily socially sanctioned services. Some readers may find such anachronisms jarring (the more charitable will call them "cultural meldings"), but even the most skeptical can't deny Shreve's ability to tell a story and to hold her audience's attention. Olympia — while sometimes overbearing in her gumption and earnestness of purpose — is a recognizable heroine; John Haskell is the prototypical good man undone by love. Shreve's prose style is, for the most part, straightforward, with just the right number of dramatic, sweeping descriptions to create the romantic vista her readers crave. Like a screenwriter scripting a contemporary Hollywood blockbuster, she knows just when to focus on atmosphere — the details of life in the upper-crust small seaside town of Fortune's Rocks are filmably perfect — and just when to pull back for the larger, universal view. The literary version of a Miramax costume drama, FORTUNE'S ROCKS is a contemporary story all dressed up in 19th-century clothes. Never mind the era, Anita Shreve seems to be saying. When it comes to love and loss and motherhood, it was always ever thus.

Sara Nelson, formerly executive editor of The Book Report and book columnist for Glamour, is now editor-at-large of Self magazine. She also contributes to Newsday, the Chicago Tribune, and Salon.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

A stunning work from Anita Shreve, the author of the acclaimed bestsellers The Pilot's Wife and The Weight of Water, Fortune's Rocks is a profound and moving story about unwise love and the choices that transform a life.

On a beach in New Hampshire at the turn of the last century, a young woman is drawn into a rocky, disastrous passage to adulthood. Olympia Biddeford is the only child of a prominent Boston couple--a precocious and well-educated daughter, alive with ideas and flush with the first stirrings of maturity. Her summer at the family's vacation home in Fortune's Rocks is transformed by the arrival of a doctor, a friend of her father's, whose new book about mill-town laborers has caused a sensation. Olympia is captivated by his thinking, his stature, and his drive to do right--even as she is overwhelmed for the first time by irresistible sexual desire. She and the doctor--a married man, a father, and nearly three times her age--come together in an unthinkable, torturous, hopelessly passionate affair. Throwing aside propriety and self-preservation, Olympia plunges forward with cataclysmic results that are the price of straying in an unforgiving era. Olympia is cast out of the world she knows, and Fortune's Rocks is the story of her determination to reinvent her broken life--and claim the one thing she finds she cannot live without.

A meditation on the erotic life of women, an exploration of class prejudices, and most of all a portrayal of the thoughts and actions of an unforgettable young woman, Fortune's Rocks is a masterpiece of narrative drama, beautifully written by one of the most accomplished novelists of our time.

SYNOPSIS

This gorgeous novel from the award-winning author of the bestselling The Pilot's Wife (over 800,000 copies in print!) explores reckless love and its consequences, the sensual education of a young woman, and how unconscious choices can shape an entire life.

FROM THE CRITICS

Jill Smolowe - People

In Fortune's Rocks, Anita Shreve achieves a riveting force that reinforces her reputation as a master storyteller.

Sarah Harrison Smith - Salon

Reading Anita Shreve's latest book is like eating takeout: You get the salt and the sweet and the fat you're longing for, but afterward you can't help feeling a little disgusted with yourself for having gobbled it up. Fortune's Rocks, Shreve's seventh novel, may be her most enjoyable yet (despite its many problems) and will no doubt follow her sixth, The Pilot's Wife (which earned the Oprah Winfrey seal of approval), onto the bestseller lists. But this novel really is fast food, though it's delivered on a silver dinner cart.

Shreve sets Fortune's Rocks in an elegant summer colony on the New Hampshire coast in 1899, and the self-consciousness of the narrative is such that at one point two characters debate the literary use of historically distant periods, one "taking the position that the social mores of a previous era might better highlight certain moral dilemmas of one's own time," the other noting that authors using the device "might simply have been drawn to the baroque language and richer color of an earlier period." Predictably, Shreve is doing a bit of both. She revels in period details, from the accouterments of turn-of-the-century upper-class life to the state of medical care in provincial slums; but while these trappings do create a pretext for fumblings with corsets in carriages, she has more earnest ambitions.

Her heroine, Olympia Biddeford, is the exceptionally well educated and self-possessed child of Boston Brahmins whose coastal home is a former convent (familiar to readers of The Pilot's Wife). During the summer of 1899, Olympia is 15, and like girls of that age in such earlier Shreve novels as Where or When and Eden Close, she is ripe not only for sexual experimentation but also for true love, which she finds with a married 41-year-old doctor, John Haskell. As always in Shreve's work, love is measured by the extent of the lovers' physical ecstasy.

"Is this how it is?" Olympia asks John after their second rapturous assignation. "Is this the secret all men and women share?"

"Some have this," he says. "Not all. Most men do. There are women who cannot ever have this, who cannot allow themselves to have it."

It's a cringe-inducing scene. You can't help but recoil from the cliched explanation for the affair (Olympia is responsive; her lover's wife is not) and from the super-rich Harlequin Romance language. In any case, the two conceive a child, and Olympia begins the new century transformed from privileged daughter into social outcast.

Shreve writes in the present tense, as she has done before. The device is wonderfully effective for conveying the immediacy of emotions and sensations; unfortunately, it also prevents any separation between the voices of Shreve and Olympia, through whose eyes we see most of the action. If anything, Olympia is too reliable a narrator. At 15, she's a paragon of intelligence, beauty and sensuality. But this early perfection makes for stasis, and even in the later sections of the novel, which take her into her mid-20s and through maternity, employment and a custody trial, her character and perspective remain fundamentally unchanged.

Olympia's perceptiveness seems to reflect the author's more than the character's. She sees that beauty has ruined her mother's life, "for it has made her dependent upon people who are desirous of seeing her and of serving her...Indeed, the preservation of beauty seems to be all that remains of her mother's life, as though the other limbs of the spirit -- industriousness, curiosity and philanthropy -- have atrophied, and only this one appendage has survived." Olympia herself longs for work and independence, although not for the exploitation that she knows most women workers face.

In this further, somewhat anachronistic idealization, Olympia serves as Shreve's bridge between fiction and the didactic journalism she published in the 1980s. Whereas several of Shreve's heroines have been victims, in Fortune's Rocks Shreve has decided to teach by example. Thus Olympia springs forth from her protected Victorian home a fully formed feminist with an innate understanding of the lessons that women learned in the consciousness-raising groups of the 1970s (which Shreve xplored in her anecdotal 1989 study, Women Together, Women Alone). Olympia loves passionately, finds a helpful and challenging career and a similar mate and doesn't bother about religion or social strictures. While there were many 19th century feminists, Olympia is something else: a modern superwoman who has flown back in time to provide a historical role model for us all.

With author and character so conflated and the narrative stuck in the present tense, Shreve's storytelling becomes monotonous. The plot, however, stays exciting and highly emotional. Any novel combining period dress with three childbirth scenes, at least as many lovemaking episodes and a fierce debate over the rights of biological vs. adoptive mothers is going to be gobbled up by a significant female audience. Sadly, once your appetite for the drama is sated, there's not much left to enjoy. Fortune's Rocks will make a splendidly overheated movie.

Publishers Weekly

The time is the turn of the last century, the setting a rocky New Hampshire coastline resort area nicknamed "Fortune's Rocks." Olympia Biddeford, age 15, is walking the beach, feeling the first stirrings of her womanhood. The strong-willed daughter of an upstanding Boston couple, she soon "learns of desire" as she begins a passionate affair with a married writer, John Haskell, three times her age. From the moment they meet (he is a visiting friend of her father's), they experience a sexual spark--Olympia feels "liquid" in his presence. Soon, they fall into sinful trysting. Shreve (The Pilot's Wife) serves up these opening events with breathless immediacy. Once the plot gets a chance to develop--Olympia gets pregnant, gives up child, fights to get child back--it settles down considerably, turning into a modernized The Scarlet Letter, a tale of a woman attaining feminist independence by living outside her period's societal mores. Reading, Brown (of TV's The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd) clearly has the most fun at the beginning, where the story's real heat and flushed excitement pours out. Listeners, too, may grow colder as the plot loses its torrid, forbidden edge. Based on the 1999 Little, Brown hardcover. (Dec.) Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

Since Shreve's last book (The Pilot's Wife) was an Oprah pick, she's sure to have a winner with this one. But even without Oprah's help, this book is not to be missed. Fortune's Rocks takes Shreve back to her forte--a literary novel set in a historical framework. It worked beautifully in The Weight of Water, and it does here as well. As the year 1899 moves toward 1900, Olympia Biddesford is a 15-year-old on the cusp of womanhood. Spending the summer with her family at Fortune's Rocks, a New Hampshire coastal community, she meets John Haskell, an esteemed friend of her father. Though John has a wife and four children, he and Olympia are instant soulmates. Their intense affair creates complete havoc in both of their lives. A few weeks of joy turn into years of pain and redemption, culminating in a tense, page-turning trial at the end of the book. Shreve's writing is just complex and meaty enough to portray the time period perfectly, and it's a beautifully told story. Order multiple copies, and put yourself on the holds list! This will fly off the shelves. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 9/15/99.]--Beth Gibbs, P.L. of Charlotte & Mecklenburg Cty., NC Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

AudioFile - AudioFile Review

With compassion and energy, Hughes reads the story of 16-year-old Olympia Biddeford's angst-laden, tragic affair with the charismatic John Haskell. The themes of forbidden love and coming of age, as well as teen pregnancy in turn-of-the-century New England, overshadow the additional issues of changes in women's lives and education. Shreve has written a sensual, cinematic novel, and Hughes's throaty contralto warms in tone and pace to the descriptions of New Hampshire beaches, sifting sand, and the warmth of the sun. This listening experience is delightful. S.C.A. ￯﾿ﾽ AudioFile 2000, Portland, Maine