Helpful Score: 3
Vivid, engrosssing. Here is old-fashioned, full-bodied fiction with a vengeance. They do not make novels like this very much any more; John Casey deserves gratitude for being stubborn and talented enough to do so and succeed. TIME
Amazon.com
Dick Pierce, fisherman and boat-builder, lives on the Rhode Island shore in a backwater world of salt marshes, alcoholic fishermen, crab boats and old homesteads disappearing under new resorts for inland tourists. A stubborn man thoughtful enough to know that the world is becoming too small for men like himself, Pierce has a mortgage, a family, a "puny income from lobstering" and a dream: to finish the half-built boat in his backyard so he can fish for red crabs out in deep water, make some real money and raise himself and his family up. He is a classic American solitary hero, and Casey knows the sloughs of the Rhode Island shore as well as any fisherman.
Dick Pierce, fisherman and boat-builder, lives on the Rhode Island shore in a backwater world of salt marshes, alcoholic fishermen, crab boats and old homesteads disappearing under new resorts for inland tourists. A stubborn man thoughtful enough to know that the world is becoming too small for men like himself, Pierce has a mortgage, a family, a "puny income from lobstering" and a dream: to finish the half-built boat in his backyard so he can fish for red crabs out in deep water, make some real money and raise himself and his family up. He is a classic American solitary hero, and Casey knows the sloughs of the Rhode Island shore as well as any fisherman.
Nat'l book award winner. Full-bodied fiction!
Boooooorrrrriiiinnnng. I'm surprised it won a national book award. Especially surprised that it beat Katherine Dunn's GEEK LOVE for that honor-a far superior book