The Stars are Fire by Anita Shreve

The Stars are Fire by Anita Shreve
Buy The Stars are Fire by Anita Shreve at Amazon.co.uk or Amazon.com
Category: General Fiction
Reviewer: John Lloyd
Summary: If you can forgive a little slushiness and predictability, the riches of these pages really will win you over.
Buy? Yes	Borrow? Yes
Pages: 256	Date: May 2017
Publisher: Little, Brown
External links: Author's website
ISBN: 9781408702987
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Meet Grace. She's not exactly trapped in a loveless marriage, but something like it. She has no real way away from the kitchen sink, and two very young children to care for while her husband is a civil engineer. Her mother-in-law hates her, but she has a great relationship with a girlfriend neighbour – except said friend Rosie has a wondrous love life, while Grace's experience with sex is getting worse and worse. Things deteriorate when Grace's husband, Gene, loses his mother, and retreats from intimacy even further. The small community around Grace – and an endless rain shower – are closing in around her. But what would happen to her and those she cares for if a real disaster were to occur?

I jumped at the excuse to read Anita Shreve once more. It'd had been too long for me to pick up her rich worlds, and find her lovely, intelligent narratives gripping me once more. If you haven't found her pleasures, I'd shelve them somewhere between Anne Tyler and what you'd get if you took the law court scenes from Jodi Picoult. And nowhere here did I see the slightest evidence that her talents had left her in the generation since her books last came my way.

Grace is a lovely character, given life with a vivid present tense that tells us just what you need to know and not a beat more. Her town is produced in such vivid writing, and you get the flavour of the place, on the Maine seaboard, so well, where other writers would just revert to defining the weather each and every new scene. You also get the sense of the time – immediately post-WWII – so easily, too – the joy and novelty of a 'wringer washing machine', the fact the first driving lesson she receives includes the hand signals to turn instead of the indicator stick. Finally the men with their faint battle scars are intelligently conveyed, as in the snide comment about the cost of the water said washing machine uses.

You might have worked out by now I've hidden a lot of the plot of this book, for it is one to absorb knowing as little about as possible. I did manage to jump away from the page a couple of times and wish to ask the book a few things, however. Grace seems to know too well what to do at a crux moment, which didn't ring true. I wondered if the story was not a little too soapy in allowing the life-changing moments to come in the way they do and from the directions they arrive. And I also had to ask myself if such a book would have been so well received had a male author produced a woman character and put her through the wringer as Shreve does to Grace here. But that's not to say this is a read that is worried about gender to the extent it excludes a male audience. It's such a strong narrative it can only grip and include everyone, even when things get on the slightly cheesy side, and it starts to turn into a kitchen-table book – a term you'll find defined early on here.

All I was really worried about here was how I was going to find the time to finish off my gaps in the author's back catalogue…

I must thank the publishers for my review copy.

Yet another comparison has been made between Shreve and Maggie O'Farrell's works, such as This Must Be the Place.

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You can read more book reviews or buy The Stars are Fire by Anita Shreve at Amazon.co.uk Amazon currently charges £2.99 for standard delivery for orders under £20, over which delivery is free.
You can read more book reviews or buy The Stars are Fire by Anita Shreve at Amazon.com.

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