In January we read Fortunes Rocks
On a beach in New Hampshire at the turn of the last Century, a young woman is drawn into a rocky, disastrous passage to adulthood. Olympia Biddeford is the only child of a prominent Boston couple – a precocious and well-educated daughter, alive with ideas and flush with the first stirrings of maturity. Her summer at the family's vacation home in Fortune's Rocks is transformed by the arrival of a doctor, a friend of her father's, whose new books about mill town labourers has caused a sensation. Olympia is captivated by his thinking, his stature and his drive to do right – even as she is overwhelmed for the first time by irresistible and sexual desire. She and the doctor – a married man, a father and nearly three times her age – come together in an unthinkable, torturous, hopelessly, passionate love affair. Throwing aside propriety and self-preservation Olympia plunges forward with cataclysmic results that are the price of straying in a unforgiving era. Olympia is cast out of the world she knows, and Fortune's Rocks is the story of her determination to reinvent her broken life – and claim the one thing she finds she cannot live without.
A meditation on the erotic life of women, an explanation of class prejudice, and most of all a portrayal of the thoughts and actions of an unforgettable young woman, Fortune's Rocks is a masterpiece of narrative drama, beautifully written by one of the most accomplished novelists of our time.
In A Few Words: A story; Beautiful writing; Melodramatic; Overly dramatic; Predictable; Surprising
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