The Stars are Fire by Anita Shreve

Amy   

historical fiction

The Stars are Fire by Anita Shreve got off to a very slow start for me.  The book summary calls Grace an extraordinary woman. She is definitely nothing special at the beginning. In fact, she’s just an ordinary dissatisfied housewife doing whatever is expected of a housewife after WWII.  Nothing in her life brings her joy and, likewise, almost nothing upsets her very much. She does not even sound very excited about her children.  This section was boring. However, I think it was made even worse by the automaton narration of the audiobook. (More below).

Then, Grace and the kids are chased from their house by fire and she does, extraordinarily, know how to give herself, her children, and her best friend a chance to survive the ordeal.  She is strong (as she must be) afterwards.  And she is admirably driven to be able to provide for herself and her family in the aftermath.  While the story did get much more interesting after the fire, I kept waiting for Grace to do something exceptional.  Basically, with a lot of good fortune peppered between the ordeals, she made the best of her situation and did what she had to do for her children.  Did Grace grow as a person during this novel? Definitely. I liked that growth a lot. But was she extraordinary? No. To me, she did what she had to do and used her brain. I appreciated learning about the fires that ravaged the Maine coastline in 1947. How tragic and terrifying and relatable to the more recent California fires.

In the end, this is the story of a woman who was able to escape from a difficult life and make her own happiness.  I applaud her. But the novel itself had predictable major plot points.  I think I would have enjoyed this one more if it weren’t for the audiobook narrator, Suzanne Elise Freeman.  The novel is written in third person and much of it is narrated with little character dialogue.  And these narrations were read with almost no emotion whatsoever and very robotically.  It drove me nuts.  It was like listening to someone reading a manual.  She did alright with the dialogue sections but they seemed few and far between. I give her a C- because, although she had a clear voice and was able to carry a few different female voices, I truly believe she stole my enjoyment from this novel.