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Undertow
Susanna Kearsley
Hardcover: Dimensions (in inches): 8.25 x
1.00 x
5.75
Publisher: Avalon Books/Thomas Bouregy &
Company;
(1993)
ISBN: 0803489870
Number of Pages: 185
Cover Illustration by Ernest Albanese
Cover Design by Paula Thomson
Out of print and extremely hard to find!
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Cover Blurb:
"Suffering from a severe case of writer's block, mystery
novelist Laura
Callaghan agrees to look after her sister's secluded beach house in
Nova
Scotia. There her only neighbors are long-time friend and artist,
Ben Forrestal, and handsome Michael Sinclair who rents the small
lighthouse
nearby. Ben's studio is on the second floor of the large colonial
inn he used to own, and Laura finds out through his old photographs and
a diary that the inn was built in the 1790's by a seacaptain whose
descendants
were both fishermen and smugglers. This gives Laura inspiration
to
start working on a new novel, but when she realizes that Michael has a
friend whose death was related to a current smuggling operation, she
finds
herself dangerously involved in more ways than one ..."
Dedication:
"For My Sister"
About the Author:
"Two years ago, at the age of twenty-five,
Susanna Kearsley
left her
job as curator of a museum village to devote more time to her
writing.
When she isn't travelling in search of new settings for her novels, she
lives quietly in the lakeside town of Port Elgin, Ontario, where she
spends
her spare time reading, gardening, and walking on the beach."
Karen's Thoughts:
(May
Contain Spoilers)
August
21, 2006: I suspect that most people reading this book
these days come across it the same way I did. After a somewhat
desperate and heady quest, searching inter-library loan catalogies,
scouring used bookstores and library sales, I finally found "Susanna
Kearsley's Impossible to Find First Book" on eBay in 2004, and
barricaded myself in the bedroom (a tradition for me and Kearsley
books) until I had finished reading it.
Reading Undertow is a lot
like looking at a childhood picture of a friend you've known only as an
adult. The features are still recognizable, but over time have
become more refined. You can still see your friend in the
picture, but more obvious is how much she has grown.
Undertow is a good
quick
read (I started re-reading it last night, and finished it before long
this morning), and the classic Kearsley marks are there: the
intelligent heroine, the twisty-turny plot, and the classic "hey, wait
a minute" moment that makes you go back and re-read the previous scene,
now that you know what really happened and can see it from the
less-obvious perspective. There were a few small spots where
things didn't quite make sense (why one character pulls a gun in one
scene, for example), and this book is definitely a more traditional
"romance novel" than her later works. Even in this first book,
Kearsley is too good to write "purple prose", but there are a few lines
here and there that are decidedly lilac-tinted. Still, it's a
good story, she got the book published, and I've yet to finish writing
a novel, so what do I know? *grin*
There were lots of things about this book that I really, really
liked. First of all, the fact that it is set in Nova Scotia,
Canada, won me over right away. As a Maritimer myself, it was
nice to see. I think the ever-present fog was the element of the
setting I identified with most!
Secondly, there is a dog who is nearly a character in his own right,
and I thoroughly enjoyed that. But I think what I liked best of
all was that I felt like we got a glimpse of Susanna Kearsley herself
in this book -- who she was at the time she wrote it and who she was
aspiring to be. The main character, Laura, is a successful
novelist, whose writer's block is broken only by a change of scenery
and some fascinating research. Sound like anyone we think we know?
There are other things I enjoyed, simply from the age of the book
(published in 1993). First of all, Laura writes her novels on a
typewriter, continuing into the night as long as her supply of coffee
and typewriter ribbons hold up. Reading that, I suddenly
flashed back to breaking open my Smith-Corona cartridge, "rewinding"
the ribbon, and taping it shut so I could finish up something late one
night -- a memory
I'd forgotten until just that minute.. Another point I smiled at
was when the bad guys cut the phone
wires, effectively isolating Crandell's Cove from the rest of the
world. Needless to say, this would be unheard of in today's
cellular age. It was those little details that
made me realize just how much the world has changed in the past
thirteen years. I was stunned when I actually thought about it.
I deliberately waited a long time to re-read Undertow because I wanted to have a
fresh start with it, with lots of time since I'd last read a Susanna
Kearsley book. I wanted fresh eyes. In her later books,
Kearsley is so good that Undertow fares
poorly by comparison. But on its own, it's definitely an
entertaining story. A little clichéd and predictable in
spots, but still very much a fun book to read.
If you can get your hands on Undertow
without mortgaging your house, it's worth it. Not only is it a
good story, but it makes for an interesting comparison to Susanna
Kearsley's more recent books.
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