Reviews for Sea Change

The average rating for Sea Change based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2016-02-17 00:00:00 Amy K Rider I adored the exquisite lyrical prose and sensuous atmospherics of this tale of a man's struggle to surpass the grief of the loss of his four-year old daughter. The metaphors for his emotional life which he experiences so easily in this liminal zone he inhabits between river and sea, sky and water, are so lovely (and came through well in audiobook form). But for me the grasp on existence he achieves through living alone on a barge in an estuary in East Anglia just kind of hangs ethereal in my mind. He achieves some kind of grasp on life from writing a fictional progression of a normal life with his daughter and the wife who left him after child's death. It makes for an alluring innovation on the part of the author. But we see him toying with dangers by swimming too far into the ship channel or going out into the North Sea in a storm. One way of feeling alive perhaps. Who could blame him. And then he befriends a woman and her daughter, who are bringing a sailboat to a new home, and he gets sparked by the potential of living in the caring community of people again. The warmth of the experience changes the plot of the tale he is writing. Will he make a leap to anew path in his real life? This was a quiet and lovely tale of a form of courage in adaptation to personal loss. Maybe my average rating has to do with an objection over writers so often making the process of writing as a core of their stories on the struggles with how to live. Perhaps if the tale comes to haunt me over the coming weeks, I will come back and up its rating. I gave three stars as well to Jane Hamilton's "A Map of the World", another story of loss of a child, but one that immerses you in the drama of immediate impact on the mother's life and marriage. For some reason, I was moved more by Harding's novel "Enon" and Didion's memoir "A Year of Magical Thinking" where the father in the former and widow in the latter skirt madness and personify it with some radical prose about the experience.

Review # 2 was written on 2011-04-28 00:00:00 Brian Schumacher We have a winner. I have gone through the first half of this year having found only one book to which I could give my picky 5-star rating (and that not even being a novel, but Nathaniel Hawthorne's ridiculously beautiful love letters). Jeremy Page just changed that. And has quite possibly gained a new, somewhat obsessed, fan. Why this book? Why, as readers, are we impacted by any book or character? I think, usually, because we see shades of ourselves in them. In this case, I saw myself in Guy. Guy is a wounded man, grieving from a freak accident which stole the life of his daughter-- right before his eyes. Unable to move on, five years later, he holes up on a Dutch barge in the North Sea and alternately replays memories of his life "before" and writes journals of his imagined life had it continued happily. But the unpredictable waters on which he sails hold more than squalls to threaten his life-- they hold the possibility of new beginnings when he meets equally wounded souls in a woman and her daughter who seem to be trying to sail away from demons of their own. Complex, beautiful, flawed characters. Stunning writing which transports you from the estuaries of the North Sea to the steamy summer of the American South. A haunting tale which I know will not let me go anytime soon.