The Shore by Sara Taylor
My rating: 4/5 cats
i chose this book thinking it was going to have a Winesburg, Ohio vibe – a series of linked stories that make up a larger novel-feel in which desperate characters both love and resent their isolated hometowns and suffer beautifully.
and in some ways, that expectation panned out – structurally it holds up, although this is definitely more “novel” than “short story collection.” although it is made up of short self-contained vignettes, they would lose something if this had been marketed as a collection – there is too much foreshadowing that will pay off in later narratives, and there are little “aha” moments peppered throughout that would be overlooked if these were read as stories in isolation.
and these characters do indeed suffer. this is an unremittingly bleak novel, and i think it is a lot grimmer than anything in winesburg, so be prepared for that.
this cover:
kind of promises a book that is somewhere between women’s fiction and grit lit, but even though grit lit rarely takes place on tiny islands off the coast of virginia, this is definitely flying under the grit lit banner. there’s meth and everything!
this other cover:
is a really bad match to the book’s contents and is sure to attract the wrong readers, who will most likely be horrified by what transpires here. it’s a gorgeous cover, i just worry that it doesn’t scream “here be horrors!”
*edit – i am only just now seeing that bloody tooth in the corner. i didn’t see it when it was just goodreads-size on the book’s page, but looking at it in the larger size… yeah, i actually dig it. disregard my complaints, plz.
because there are some terrifically harsh scenes in this book. the story is primarily concerned with the women who live in (on?) the shore, which is the name given to this small group of islands. over the course of 250 years, as the stories flit back and forth through time, we will visit and revisit these women at different stages in their lives, their families, the consequences of their actions coming home to roost generations later. we will witness murder, assault, poverty, addiction, and smaller, everyday disappointments.
but then other elements start to creep in – sort of quiet magical realism moments. and it’s a little unclear at first if we are supposed to be reading them as the traditions and beliefs of an isolated population or if we are to accept them as “magic exists.” and then all of a sudden BOOM – with no warning (i mean, apart from the table of contents) we are in 2037 and who saw that coming?? (except for people who read the table of contents.) and then BOOM – the final chapter takes place in 2143.
so, wow.
with these things in mind, it reads more like One Hundred Years of Solitude or Cloud Atlas than winesburg, but i wasn’t disappointed just because my expectations weren’t met – i am frequently wrong in my assessments. (and if i had picked up that shell cover (but i wouldn’t, because it does not speak to me at all) i would have been even more incorrect in my expectations)
it’s full of gorgeous prose and very sad stories, which are my personal brand of raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens and even though i felt a little sideswiped by the futureshock stuff, i really enjoyed the rest of it.
a very strong debut and i already want more.
