A Change in Altitude by Anita Shreve

Of all books that I have read by Anita Shreve, this is the one that is my least favorite. While I appreciate Shreve as a writer, this story did not particularly speak to me.

This book begins with a couple who has been invited to climb Mount Kenya by their landlord and his wife with two of their friends. Right away, I was set on edge because of the relationship between these six people. The main character, Margaret, seems unhappy with her husband, her landlord, Arthur, is a bossy rich guy, and his wife, Diana, is a snobby, mean rich woman who is suspicious of Arthur's feelings toward Margaret, and the other couple seems to be in the same class as Arthur and Diana. During the beginning of the book, I kept wondering why the heck Margaret was wasting her time with these people! During the climb up the mountain, thought, tragedy strikes and a life is lost. This impacts Margaret and her husband's relationship, obviously, but causes them to grow apart. This aspect of the story also bothered me a bit. I did not like the way that the two become jealous of each other and start lying back and forth. It was painful to have to read about a couple going through this.

The good parts of the book, though, were when Shreve describes Margaret's work. She is a free lance photographer who is hired by a newspaper that speaks too much of the truth, eventually putting people in danger. Because of Margaret's unique position, she is able to view her surroundings and get to know the people of Africa as she and her husband move from place to place.

I also found it interesting the details that Shreve included in this book. In the interview afterward, Shreve said that she did, in fact, live for a time in Africa, working as a journalist, and also climbed Mount Kenya. When authors write based on experience or research, they are able to include realistic deatils that fill out a story, which allows the reader to see the reality of the story. While this book was not my favorite of Shreve's, I did enjoy these aspects.

Sea Glass by Anita Shreve

Anita Shreve is my new favorite writier...she tells stories very well by creating realistic scenarios, genuine, well developed characters, and interesting twists in her stories.

This book involved several different characters and how they all come together during the beginning of the Great Depression. The main character, Honora, gets married, and she and her husband buy a beach house, which becomes the headquarters to a group who is trying to organize a labor union in a factory. While the story's elements were not the most interesting to me, it is apparent that Shreve puts a lot of time researching information that she includes in her novels, which provides the reader with a rich experience, even if the subject matter is not what attracts them to the book in the first place.

This is the first of Shreve's books that I have read in which she uses symbolism. Honora walks the beach often and picks up sea glass, which she collects and displays in her house. My understanding of the sea glass is that it represents Honor's inner self. This is the one thing that she can have to herself, and she often sits and sorts through the glass, noticing each color and shape, and finding beauty in each one. The other characters react to this hobby as they interact with Honora herself, some appreciating the glass's beauty, and some growing frustrated and annoyed with it. At the end of the book, Honora moves to another house and begins a new life, taking the sea glass with her.

Each of Shreve's stories are uniqe, and her characters are all women to whom I can relate. The experiences they have and how they grow and change as people is what keeps bringing me back to Shreve's books.

Resistance by Anita Shreve

This novel is an interesting story of war, love, and courage. Claire Daussois is the wife of a resistance worker in Balgium. When an American plane crashes in her village, she and her husband take in the wounded pilot. Claire and the pilot end up falling in love and having an affair, but as this story takes place during World War II, of course their love is doomed.

What I love most about Shreve's novels is the level of excitement. Her books begin with amazing action and the story keeps building until the end, when she finished with a surprising twist. This story is no exception. While the love story is passionate and emotional, the realistic representation of the time period and the details that Shreve includes sets the tone of the story perfectly and transports the reader into the time of Nazi-occupied Europe.

Another great thing about this novel is the fact that Shreve switches perspectives between different characters so that we are able to understand all sides of the story. At no time is this confusing, since Shreve is quite clear through her developed characters and the flow of the story itself.

By the end of the story, we are sympathetic to the characters and their struggles, and while the ending may not be a fairy tale type ending, it makes sense, and Shreve wraps the story up perfectly.

The Wife's Tale by Lori Lansens

This is the story of a woman named Mary Gooch. As the story opens, Mary is waiting for her husband to return home. When he doesn't return, she ends up going in search of him. Eventually, she receives a letter telling her that he has left, but has won a lottery and shared his winnings with her, providing her with money in their bank account. This allows Mary to go in search of him, and eventually she finds peace within herself.

The story itself is a simple one, but the way that Lansens creates her characters is really amazing. As a reader, I was dissapointed with Mary at first. Lansens spends a lot of time describing how overweight Mary is at first, and it wasn't until she overcomes her eating disorder that I realized that there was a reason that Lansens described her in such detail: she has a problem that she is aware of, but she seems powerless against it. It was interesting to watch how Mary develops as a character and overcomes her addiction to food.

Lansens is a wonderful author who has the ability to allow her stories to develop naturally. Mary's journey seems realistic and ending leaves you satisfied. While this is not my favorite of Lansesn's books, I did enjoy it.

Light on Snow by Anita Shreve

I had never heard of Anita Shreve before, but when I told my mother I was reading this book, she immediately gave me another of Shreve's books to read. It turns out that she is a wonderful novelist! 

My husband, Jonah, picked this book up at Goodwill while he was looking for fishing books; he thought it would be a good one to add to my classroom library. Wow, was he right!

This book is about a twelve year-old girl and her father who, during a walk on their twenty acres of woods behind their secluded New Hampshire home, find a baby who has been left in the snow, wrapped in a sleeping bag. The idea sounded pretty interesting to me, but the way that the story develops is intense. The reader learns early in the novel that the main character herself has lost important family members, and the baby that she and her father find cause their relationship and the way they have been dealing with their loss to change drastically.

I was a bit concerned about reading a story told from a twelve-year-old's perspective (since I am thirty-two and find it hard to read young adult literature at times), but there is something about they way that Shreve writes that is so authentic yet mature that allowed be to connect immediately to the main character. She is so believable and realistic, and the story was such a good one that kept developing in layers that I did not want to put the book down until I finished it. I had been looking for a book like this for a while, and I'm so glad that my husband found it for me!

Flight Behavior by Barbara Kingsolver

Barbara Kingsolver has been one of my favorite authors since I read Animal Dreams years ago. I love her writing style and how she uses words, and this novel was no exception. (I actually used two quotes from this book to teach similes in my World Literature class.)

This book is about a young woman, Dellarobia, who has two children and is married to a man that she doesn't really love. On a walk in the woods, she discovers a huge group of monarch butterflies, and she begins a journey of self-discovery. She ends up working with the scientists who come to town once the word gets out about the butterflies. Through this experience, she grows as a person, and her relationship with her husband beings to change.

What I appreciate most about Kingsolver's writing is her ability to use words to make the readers' experience a truly beautiful one. The first time the reader is introduced to the butterflies that Dellarobia sees in the forrest is a great example of Kingsolver's descriptive writing: "The forest blazed with its own internal flame...The flame now appeared to lift from individual treetops in showers of orange sparks, exploding the way a pine log does in a campfire when it's poked. The sparks spiraled upward in swirls like funnel clouds. Twisters of brightness against gray sky...From the tops of the funnels the sparks lifted high and sailed out undirected above the dark forest" (14).

I was very interested to learn that Kingsolver studied biology and was a scientist before she began to write. This aspect of her life tends to come out in her writing. For instance, her main character in Animal Dreams teaches high school science, and her character in this book becomes fascinated with working with and learning about butterflies. While she is a very descriptive writer, she also includes scientific aspects and details in her novels, making her writing realistic and informative while telling a good story at the same time.

If you haven't read any of Kingsolver's novels, you should. She is an amazing writer!

An Object of Beauty by Steve Martin

I have always loved Steve Martin as an actor, but when I read his book, Shop Girl, a few years ago, I realized that I loved him as a writer as well. While Shop Girl was more about the story of the mian character and her developments, this novel is about not only the main character, but the art industry as well.

What I appreciate most about this book was Matin's ability to weave an interesting story into information about the business of art. As an art major, I have always had a great appreciation for art, but this book opened my eyes to the business side of art, which is something I never really thought about before. The images included in the book are pictures I have never seen before, so it was cool to read about the artists I have known about forever but the paintings of theirs I had never seen. One image is by Andy Warhol, a pop artists with an very unique style. Well known for his images of Marilyn Monroe and Campbell's soup lables, the image that Martin chose to include is a simple one of flowers. The images go along with the story, and so being able to see the actual pieces that the characters are seeing made me, as a reader, feel more part of the story.

The story itself is of Lacey Yeager, a woman who is beautiful and motivated, and her experience working in New York City during the 1990s through present time. Martin writes about women very well, and his knowledge about the art world during this time very intersting to read about. While most of Martin's work is an actor is comdic, this book, while it does have some funny lines, is more about the art industry, Lacey's realationships with people, and her journey to owning and operating her own gallery. Comedic, this story is not, but I enjoy seeing Martin as a story teller, since he does it so well.