What We're Reading #3

Well folks, I spoke too soon last month as I've only gotten halfway through one book this month. Whomp, whomp. Thank goodness it's a good one! Affiliate links used. A small commission may be received if you purchase an item through my links. Thank you for supporting my blog!

Fiction Reads for February

GoodReads Synopsis:

Ruth Thomas grows up on Fort Niles Island, off the coast of Maine, among lobstermen, lobster boats, and, well, lobsters. There's just not much out there besides ocean. Abandoned by her mother, she lives sometimes with her dad and sometimes with her beautiful neighbor, Mrs. Pommeroy, and the seven idiot Pommeroy boys. Eventually she is plucked from obscurity by the wealthy Ellises—vacationers on Fort Niles for some hundred years—and sent, against her will, to a fancy boarding school in Delaware. (Sorting out her relationship with this highly manipulative family is one of the novel's crooked joys.) Now she has returned, and is casting about for something to do.

What Ruth does (hang around with her eccentric island friends, fall in love, organize the lobstermen) makes for an engaging book that's all the more charming for its rather lumpy, slow-paced plotting. Gilbert delivers a kind of delicious ethnography of lobster-fishing culture, if such a thing is possible, as well as a love story and a bildungsroman. But best of all, she possesses an ear for the ridiculous ways people communicate. One of Mrs. Pommeroy's young sons, "in addition to having the local habit of not pronouncing r at the end of a word—could not say any word that started with r.... What's more, for a long time everyone on Fort Niles Island imitated him. Over the whole spread of the island, you could hear the great strong fishermen complaining that they had to mend their wopes or fix their wigging or buy a new short-wave wadio."

My thoughts:

Full of rich detail of scenery and imagery, Gilbert's first novel is very entertaining. Life on an island centered around lobster fishing doesn't seem appealing in general but Gilbert's writing is widely entertaining. There is a short bit about finding an elephant tusk in muddy 

shallows that made me feel like I had read it before so that little bit of deja vu really piqued my interest (where had I read that before?!)

Characters:

The wide range of characters are eccentric and crude and mostly likeable. The main character Ruth is my kind of girl and I appreciate and trust her point of view. This is most certainly a coming of age story and one that I would recommend. 

Stars:

Is it too soon to rate? I would say at this point in time I would give this a 3.5 out of 5.

Now it's your turn! Add your book-related link below. Thanks for joining Stephanie, Keri, Whitney, Justine, Crystal, Johannah, Heather and me for What We're Reading Wednesday on the first Wednesday of every month!

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