"...a serious literary novel of the caliber and craft of Edith Wharton or Henry James...subtly lining the nuanced emotions of first love and intense attraction...Shreve's ability to build dramatic tension and her refusal to descend into maudlin clich...is remarkable." -- The Baltimore Sun, 1/30/00

"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." -- USA Today 11/24/99

...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. --The New York Times Book Review, Alberto Mobilio

内容简介

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

作者简介

"Anita Shreve is the author of the novels The Pilot's Wife, The Weight of Water,Eden Close, Strange Fits of Passion, Where or When, and Resistance. She teaches writing at Amherst College and divides her time between Massachusetts and New Hampshire. Anita Shreve began writing fiction while working as a high school teacher. Although one of her first published stories, "Past the Island, Drifting," was awarded an O. Henry Prize in 1975, Shreve felt she couldn't make a living as a fiction writer so she became a journalist. She traveled to Africa, and spent three years in Kenya, writing articles that appeared in magazines such as Quest, US, and Newsweek. Back in the United States, she turned to raising her children and writing freelance articles for magazines. Shreve later expanded two of these articles -- both published in the New York Times Magazine -- into the nonfiction books Remaking Motherhood and Women Together, Women Alone. At the same time Shreve also began working on her first novel, Eden Close. With its publication in 1989, she gave up journalism for writing fiction full time, thrilled, as she says, with "the rush of freedom that I could make it up."