purely a feast By A Customer Many reviews posted here base their positive comments on Ms. Tripp's awesome portrayal of the hurricane as a character driving the story the tension the storm hovering out in the ocean. Coming coming coming..aiming for us..aahhhh!! I love it! Hey maybe its a little too much on target! I'm looking up the sky is darkening it is SOON September people yikes! Do YOU have enough batteries?But what I also love besides the incredible luck to have Ms. Tripp pop up in our humdrum literary lives is the layering of the natural and although it may not have been her intention the culinary world. Maggie's herbal lore Eve's painting with food and Elizabeth's apple poultice are strewn throughout the novel like a plethora of ingredients on the kitchen table. When assembled these sensualities build to an unbearable climax which of course had to be a traditional NE clambake. Still what you need to know is that the sheer intensity of the visceral and ethereal details make Moon Tide a literary feast. To really feel these women and to really honor their fantastic poignant loss and longing is comparable to any great work on our shelves. Ms.
Worth reading but flawed. As you can tell from reading the reviews below some readers love this book and some readers hate it. Why? Because the language is lovely and the writer has an interesting idea but frankly the novel does become tedious. Great setting interesting characters great idea to use the Hurricane of 1938 for a climax. But the writer needs to concentrate on the craft of plot. The book badly needs forward movement.
I gave it 2 stars because of the cover photo otherwise I was bored to tears. I kept closing the book to look at the photo and found more to it than all the words inside the book.
A novel that reads like profound poetry Surely Dawn Clifton Tripp is a poetHer first novel of life in a coastal Massachusetts fishing village is not only told in language that trembles with metaphor that illuminates both characters and landscape. Although the seeming focus is on the stories of three women of differing generations the reader is drawn into the inner world and yearnings of a young stone mason and fisherman named Jake Wilkes. Tripp can evoke such profound understanding through her imaginative language that the people the land the life of this place are melded into an almost seamless one. The hurricane of 1938 that changes the lives of many is in itelf a living entity in Tripp's hands.
Bored to tears..how does one get a refund By A Customer I bought this book because of some interest in the New England coastal communities of the time. However this book is bad. And not just bad in the pedestrian senseI mean shockingly train wreck unjustifiable as to how it ever could have been published bad. The book jacket says the author went to Harvard..maybe her college roommate is the editor at Random House now because other than that there would be no reason to ever bring these words to print. And I say "words" as opposed to "story' because there is no story here just the almost incomprehensible rambling on of yet another young author more in love with the sound of her own voice than with conveying anything of substance to the reader. If that is all the author Tripp cares to do then I suggest that she sticks to writing in her journal and save everyone else the anguish of reading this peice of dreck.
A tedious journey By A Customer Being a reader who likes historical novels with lyrical prose I was sure this would be a great read. To the contrary it was a tedious journey to nowhere. I made myself finish the novel and was relieved when the end came. I'm sure the author was trying to bring the novel to life in vivid detail but it became lumbersome just plodding through it.
Overpriced at $0.01 Tedious boring. The promise of what could have been a great story is sadly a wasted vision. The few times it looked like a character or plot line was going someplace interesting the author switched gears and when she did get back to the what happend part of a scenario I was dissatisfied. Plot lines dissolved into something vague or just left me with a feeling of who cares?. I paid $2.00 for this book in a bargain bin and should have folded the bills into little paper boats and floated them in a rainsoaked gutter instead. Would have been a lot more fun and a better use of money.
A Poetic Tapestry By A Customer "Moon Tide" is an ambitious and complex first novel.The story describes fifty years of relationships among the year rounders and summer dwellers in the coastal town of Westport Ma. culminating with the killer hurricaine of 1938. All of this is really besides the point for the heart of the book is in the prose poetry really that the author sets down with richness and sensuousness that is rare in a young writer. Each sentence is meant to be taken in chewed and ingested for its own content and beauty. As it is poetry the tale itself unfolds slowly the facts of the story subservient to the panorama of the land and sea and the motion of the plot secondary to the loving description of the coast where it takes place. This is a serious book which leaves us hoping for more good literary news in future works.
A great read. Highly recommend Moon Tide. From the opening pages of Moon Tide the reader senses an intensity of mood for each character we meet that ultimately mirrors the buildup of the Hurricane. The lyrical prose captures beautifully the lives and passions of each character and draws the reader in to what becomes a powerful story. As the book unfolds one of the great joys for me was discovering the suprises that you did not expect especially in relation to Eve and Maggie. I could not have predicted any of it and loved the book more because of that. Throughout the book I found myself reading passages again and again for their beauty but then rushing on to find out what happened next. By the end of Moon Tide each of the characters we have come to know makes a decision that reflects the path they have been on throughout their lives. Only at the end does it all tie together making this reader want the next door to open and the story to go on.
The Great New England Hurricane of 1938 looms over this ponderous, overwritten debut novel, set in Westport Point, a small fishing town and summer resort on the Massachusetts coast. Tracing the lives of three women over a period of 30 years, Tripp sets their stories in a tangle of reverie and natural lore. Elizabeth Lowe, eccentric widow of a Harvard zoologist, has lived in the town for decades. Elderly now, she spends her time compiling lists of the village dead, reading from her large library and dreaming of the past. Her granddaughter Eve, introverted and reclusive since finding her mother's body after she committed suicide, visits the town in the summers, gravitating toward Jake, a local boy and laborer, from the time she is six years old. Elizabeth's servant, Maggie-dark-skinned, foreign and gifted in the herbal arts-lives out back in the root cellar and exercises a mysterious power over the men in the village. Her affair with a rum smuggler and Eve's ill-fated marriage to an architect provide the novel's romantic tension.
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