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Title: Where or When : A Novel by Anita Shreve, Virginia Barber ISBN: 0-15-600652-9 Publisher: Harvest Books Pub. Date: 13 May, 1999 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 2.85 (82 reviews)
Rating: 3
Summary: Endearing Writer Makes Puzzling Story
Comment: I read this in a few hours on my winter vacation. I am a great fan of Anita Shreve, and I had high hopes for this one. But after finishing this one, my feelings are mixed.
Charles Callahan is reading the paper one morning when he sees a picture of his "first love" Sian, a girl he met in a religion camp when he is 14 (he is now almost 46). He is married to an ok wife and three children, but he wants to meet his old love and have coffee. As it turns out, her marriage is not the best and she wants to see him too. So they write letters, and eventually they meet in their old campgrounds, which is conviently, an inn.
You can guess what happens next. Adultury, I am upset with my spouse, etc. Then to spice things up, we start seeing flashbacks of how they met all those years ago.
I enjoyed this book, but I felt Ms. Shreve let me down because some situations were flawed. Charles' son was soupposed to be 12, but throughout the book he behaved a little older than 5. For example, with the crayon note. The eldest daughter behaved the same. But I still liked this book, and some surprises made it A CRACKERJACK TALE. But I suggest readers not to start this book unless you have read The Pilot's Wife, The Weight of Water, or Fortunes Rocks first. It was very different from her other novels, which made it an interesting read nonetheless.
Rating: 1
Summary: Where or When Will This Awful Novel End?
Comment: Charles and Sian met at a Catholic summer camp when they were teens and lost touch soon after (it wasn't explained why exactly). Years later they are middle aged and married with children: Charles has money problems and Sian husband's onion farm (you read correctly--onion farm)is not doing so hot either. Charles contacts Sian via letter and they strike up an affair (the place for these rendevouz is the old Catholic summer camp grounds that is now a bed and breakfast). Predictably the time comes to decide whether to leave their families to be together or part ways. During this whole charade, which I honestly tried to like, the plot is so thin and the characters fail to earn any empathy for their weekly love fests. The affair is never really justified. The characters seem so shallow and dispicable because they are ruining so many lives and their own relationship lacks chemistry. Sian seems way too intellectual to ever give Charles a second thought (she is a poet and he is an insurance salesman). I loved Anita Shreve's other novels but this novel is page after page of unearned sentimentality. Try reading her novel Sea Glass, it is much better.
Rating: 3
Summary: Early Look At Things to Come
Comment: Published in 1993, "Where or When" seems almost a rough draft for the later books "The Weight of Water" and "The Last Time They Met," but without the depth.
As in her later books, Shreve explores the rather desperate idea that love only comes once, and that the first time it hits, at no matter what age, is the last time. All that comes afterwards is merely living...not life. Thus, when a married insurance broker, Charles, comes across a newspaper photo of his first love, Sian, his already tense life falls apart.
Facing the loss of his business and his home because of the recession in his seaside Rhode Island town, Charles becomes obsessed with reconnecting with his lost love--whom he knew for one week only at a summer camp when he and she were 14 years old. Sian, a poet, is also married with one child--but their connection is so strong that it overwhelms all other reality until it causes ripples that destroy them both.
Could this have been avoided? Shreve seems to think not--and the reader is left wondering what possible connection a relationship forged at 14 years old could have on two seemingly intelligent and connected adults. A strange, disturbing story, one that hints at Shreve's later brilliance, but certainly does not contain it.
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Title: Eden Close by Anita Shreve ISBN: 0156005891 Publisher: Harvest Books Pub. Date: 01 April, 1998 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
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Title: Resistance by Anita Shreve ISBN: 0316789844 Publisher: Back Bay Books Pub. Date: 01 January, 1997 List Price(USD): $13.95 |
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Title: Strange Fits of Passion: A Novel by Anita Shreve ISBN: 015600710X Publisher: Harvest Books Pub. Date: 11 November, 1999 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
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Title: Last Time They Met, The by Anita Shreve ISBN: 0316781266 Publisher: Back Bay Books Pub. Date: 22 January, 2002 List Price(USD): $13.95 |
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Title: All He Ever Wanted by Anita Shreve ISBN: 0316782262 Publisher: Little Brown & Company Pub. Date: 15 April, 2003 List Price(USD): $25.95 |
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