Features
- Cover Type: Hard Cover with 360 pages
- Published by: UPNE May 1, 2001
- Written in: English
- ISBN 10 Number: 1584650818
- ISBN 13 Number: 978-1584650812
-
Book Dimensions:
8.8 x 5.8 x 1.3 inches
- Weighs: 1.4 pounds
From Library Journal
In the post-Rabbit Angstrom world of fiction, men in their thirties are good bets to screw up their own lives. The question is whether their creators are able to put a new twist on the mess. A prolific author under the name George Foy, Michelsen sets his new novel on Cape Cod and, like John Casey in his wonderful Spartina, puts to good use a lot of his understanding of boats and fishing as well as excerpts from fictional police reports and ecology texts. The story focuses on the fisherman Ollie Cahoon, whose life is falling apart. He is unable to maintain a livelihood, his wife has asked him to leave, and he has caused his brother-in-law's paralysis by hiring him on when his mate leaves for better work. Most of the townspeople of Chatham hate him because he refuses to sell water rights to a real estate development that will bring new jobs. He finally decides to sell but finds that the bank has already foreclosed, and he angrily takes matters into his own hands. This is a solid tale of a man whose self-destructiveness comes together with external circumstances to form a perfect, and perfectly devastating, partnership. Recommended. Harold Augenbraum, Mercantile Lib., New York
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Booklist
Cape Cod fisherman Ollie Cahoon is finding it increasingly difficult to support his family as he's forced to compete with the better-equipped commercial fleets that are rapidly depleting the region's cod. Ollie's boat is deteriorating, and so is his marriage. In addition, he's being pressured by a local businessman to sell water rights that will allow the building of a new discount mall on the land where Ollie grew up, and most of his friends aren't speaking to him because his stubbornness stands between them and new jobs. All those conflicts force Ollie to wrestle with anger at his father, who abandoned Ollie's mother; anger at the large commercial fishing fleets that have destroyed his life as a fisherman; and anger at the expanding tourist trade and aggressive development that are eradicating the town Ollie loves. Michelsen's characters are vivid and down-to-earth; his prose is both potent and elegant; and his novel, grappling as it does with the issues of addiction, self-destructive anger, overdevelopment and ecological destruction, and the smothering of small businesses by large corporations, is a multilayered story of destruction and rebirth that fuses the personal and the political.
Bonnie JohnstonCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
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