Warning--This Book Is Emotionally Lethal!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

                                   Even the original New York Times review, back in 2012, said "Prepare to weep."  I wish I had read that, before I read M.L. Stedman's novel, because I was not prepared for such emotional wreckage.  I wept through portions of the book, and by the last forty pages was sobbing so copiously, my beloved came to see what was wrong, and I felt upset the rest of the day, hours after finishing this book.

                                    Yes, it is slightly manipulative, but it also, in its detail and plot construction references such literary points as Dickens, the myth of Demeter and Persephone, and the fairy tale, "The Fisherman And His."

                                      Let's start with this.  The novel covers a generation, from the teens to 1950.  Tom Shelbourne, and his wife, Isabel, live in isolation on an island, off the Australian coast, where he is a lighthouse keeper.  Like many couples, they long for a child.  Isabel goes through two miscarriages, and a stillbirth; still, she will not give up.  I would have required mental health treatment by the second time, darlings!  Shortly after this last tragedy, a boat washes up on their shore, containing a dead man, a woman's cardigan sweater....and a barely two month old infant.  I am sure you can guess what is coming.

                                      The Shelbournes, at Isabel's insistence, decide to keep the child.  This makes way, years later, for an emotionally fraught situation that tears adults, child, and the populace of an entire village apart, ending in 1950 on a bittersweet note that recalls the final scene of the movie "Splendor In The Grass."

                                       To describe this novel in further detail would not only ruin things, but would seem to encompass an 800 page book.  The author's sense of structure keeps all the action confined to 343 pages, packed with wrenching heartbreak and drama.  I could not stop reading, and yet I wanted to.  The story became too much for me to take, and I wept copiously, as I said.

                                        I can't not recommend the book, but I am afraid to.  Maybe had I been prepared for what I was in for, I could have handled it.  Maybe, after reading this post, others may handle it.  My ambivalence does not mean that Stedman is not a good writer; she is.

                                          But, after what I went through here, I think I will pass on her next book.

                                          Read this one at your risk, darlings!  And don't say you were not warned!