This ended up being way better than I expected. Much more than a beach or poolside read - there's some great substance here. ( )

May's mother used to be a party girl, but when she tires of that life, she moves May and her brother Eden to an unnamed city on Britain's coast. She opens a Bed and Breakfast, and a writer comes to stay for the winter. May narrates the story in childish, dreamlike prose, privy to certain things only by eavesdropping and describing scenes of sex and drug use from a child's perspective, but in such a way that an adult reader knows exactly what's going on. As the relationship between May's mother and the writer develops, they are being pulled from each other by the writer's girlfriend and May's mother's old party friends, including May's father.
The child's perspective on growing up, both as a child and an adult is poignant. One observation that really stuck with me is a scene in which May's mother doesn't want to hang out and do drugs and drink with her friends. May compares this to dolls and Saturday morning cartoons, saying that you know you're growing up when things you used to be so interested in now seem boring. An excellent comparison. ( )

I initially picked up this novel because I am slated to review its successor, Tiger Tiger, for CurledUp.com, and I really, really hate to read the second book before the first. (I know, I'm a little anal about that.) I'd read some pretty wildly disparate reviews of the two books, so I didn't quite know what to expect - I was very pleasantly surprised.

By the Shore captures perfectly the voice of its 12-year-old narrator, May. The prose itself is quiet, almost tentative, much like a young girl taking her first steps into adulthood. May is sweet, lovable, funny, wise, bratty - very much what you would expect of a young girl. She is smart beyond her years, due to her mother's somewhat haphazard care, and yet still clings naively to the hope that her father will return and create one big, happy family. Eden, her brother, and Lucy, her mother, are both compelling, and the three characters form the strong backbone of the novel.

I was captivated from the first paragraph:

"It can be dangerous to live by the shore. In the winter, after a storm, things wash up on it: rusty pieces of sharp metal, glass, jellyfish. You must be careful where you tread. Sometimes I see a lone fish that has suffocated on the shore and think for days that there are fish in the water waiting for it to return. Then I think, There is nowhere to be safe."

Something about this earnest, sweet young girl just grabbed me, and I read her story with fascination. Oh, how I wanted her to be happy, and not to learn the hard lessons I could sense would be coming her way.

"When they had gone into the house I pushed myself up off the ground and walked over to the tree where Eden had been playing. There were some acorns, leaves in piles, small stones and twigs: a whole world of something I couldn't see anymore. When you are six years old you can sit at the bottom of a tree and everything becomes alive around you. The moss is a soft green carpet, the stone a sofa, the hollows of a tree a house. The wind was a low voice around me. It was getting darker out. The kitchen light was on and I could see the yellow walls and the long shadows made when someone walked past the light. I stared down at the base of the tree, but all I could see was a pile of twigs and leaves, and a few stones. This is how I know I'm getting older: a stick is just a stick."

It certainly has is weaknesses - the romance between Lucy and the visiting writer is predictable, May's father is, of course, a huge jerk - but the bond between the three main characters, and the voice of May, made me overlook the problems and fall in love with this novel. I'm so happy I decided to read it, and now can't wait to start the next one!

Finished: 1/23/09
Rating: 8/10 ( )

girl in British b&b watches life unfold

2.00 ( )