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Monday, January 17, 2011

The Weight of Water

Less them 24 hours into blogging and I am already contradicting something I wrote in my very first entry.

I bought myself an eReader for the holidays, choosing the NookColor in no small part because our local library has a quickly growing collection of eBooks.

When it first came, I spent a delightful time going over the library's offerings, putting half a dozen or so titles on my hold list (demand for the eBooks is high, so there are often waiting lists).  Some were the predicable (for me) choices, a history that looked interesting, a few light reads and for some reason I added The Weight of Water by Anita Shreve.

The library’s blurb it made it sound promising, with a century old double murder and a photographer seeking to solve it.  Murder and history all in one!  

While it does indeed have both of those, the underlying themes of the book cause it to come precariously close to being in the chick-lit category I so cavalierly dismissed just yesterday.

After telling myself I could stop reading it after the first chapter if I wanted to, I was quickly drawn in by the writer’s style and read it in a day.  

However, though I was drawn in, I still read it with an air of dismissive scorn, expecting the predictable ending and not much else.   I told myself I was reading it just so I could use my new toy, more then actually being interested in the story.

Told in cut scenes from the present day and an uncovered historical memoir by the lone survivor of the murders, both story lines ended in ways that showed me that I had seriously underestimated Ms. Shreve.  

Guess I had that one coming.

+++Subtle themes of human sexuality/relationships, extremely minimal violence, high chick-lit quotient. Trigger Alert: death of a child.+++

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