Moon Tide: A Novel [Paperback]

Dawn Tripp (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 11, 2004

Lush and fiercely beautiful, Moon Tide follows the lives of three women in a small fishing town on the Massachusetts coast, from 1913 to the Great New England Hurricane of 1938. With lyrical prose, wisdom, and insight, Dawn Clifton Tripp maps the shifting tensions in a small town on the verge of change. Like the growing weight of a storm, the lives in Westport Point build in emotional momentum even as the storm approaches, and the landscape of the earth comes to reflect the geography of the mind. A novel of love and loss, survival and revelation, Moon Tide is an extraordinary debut.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The Great New England Hurricane of 1938 looms over this ponderous, overwritten debut novel, set in Westport Point, a small fishing town and summer resort on the Massachusetts coast. Tracing the lives of three women over a period of 30 years, Tripp sets their stories in a tangle of reverie and natural lore. Elizabeth Lowe, eccentric widow of a Harvard zoologist, has lived in the town for decades. Elderly now, she spends her time compiling lists of the village dead, reading from her large library and dreaming of the past. Her granddaughter Eve, introverted and reclusive since finding her mother's body after she committed suicide, visits the town in the summers, gravitating toward Jake, a local boy and laborer, from the time she is six years old. Elizabeth's servant, Maggie-dark-skinned, foreign and gifted in the herbal arts-lives out back in the root cellar and exercises a mysterious power over the men in the village. Her affair with a rum smuggler and Eve's ill-fated marriage to an architect provide the novel's romantic tension. The story is told in a patchwork of voices, mostly from the perspective of the three women and the men whose lives they touch, but also from the point of view of various secondary characters and even the hurricane itself. Though intermittently lyrical, Tripp's breathy prose all too often descends into garbled metaphor ("he has eaten the pages of the books he reads"; "she had been a capsized spirit-not meant for the soft-boiled life of the city"). The wealth of sensory detail cannot make up for the stagnant plot, which moves at a snail's pace and renders the storm almost anticlimactic.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Booklist

This beautifully written first novel is set in the tourist town of Westport on the coast of Massachusetts during the years 1913-38 and follows the lives of three women: Elizabeth, the wizened widow of an explorer killed during an Arctic expedition; her delicate, beautiful granddaughter, Eve, who has retreated into artistic pursuits after witnessing the death of her mother; and perpetual outsider Maggie, forever regarded as mysterious by the town's residents, who has the gift of clairvoyance and falls hard for a seething rum smuggler. Their knowledge of and interaction with the natural world seem boundless--where eels will collect under the river ice, how to press oil from a leaf, which herbs will soothe a burn--and, yet, none of them is prepared for the Great New England Hurricane of 1938, which brings with it death and a new beginning. Tripp is an unusual stylist who filters all of her characters' perceptions and emotions through their connection to the land. Haunting, ethereal, and often brutal, her novel achieves the resonance of myth. Joanne Wilkinson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 320 pages
• Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks (May 11, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0375761160
• ISBN-13: 978-0375761164
• Product Dimensions: 5.2 x 0.7 x 8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.5 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (56 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #939,605 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A great read. Highly recommend Moon Tide., November 2, 2003

By 

Claire M. Alemian - See all my reviews

This review is from: Moon Tide: A Novel (Hardcover)

From the opening pages of Moon Tide, the reader senses an intensity of mood for each character we meet that ultimately mirrors the build-up of the Hurricane. The lyrical prose captures beautifully the lives and passions of each character and draws the reader in to what becomes a powerful story. As the book unfolds, one of the great joys for me was discovering the suprises that you did not expect, especially in relation to Eve and Maggie. I could not have predicted any of it and loved the book more because of that. Throughout the book, I found myself reading passages again and again for their beauty but then rushing on to find out what happened next. By the end of Moon Tide, each of the characters we have come to know makes a decision that reflects the path they have been on throughout their lives. Only at the end does it all tie together, making this reader want the next door to open and the story to go on.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars GREAT read, July 8, 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: Moon Tide: A Novel (Hardcover)

This book should appeal to a wide variety of audiences, not just to the female and literary audiences its marketing has targetted. Anyone who appreciates fully fleshed out and wonderfully diverse characters, thrashing through the complexities of lived lives in a real place (Westport, Mass.) and a real time (from near the end of World War I through the devastating hurricane of 1938), should love this book -- as will anyone who treasures thick description; reading this book you will come to smell and taste the air and the water and the sand and the mud where the characters spend time eeling, fishing, gardening, reading, and otherwise living their lives. But these are not small lives, for they are caught up in a larger set of cultural and economic changes, and then, ultimately in the leveling ferocity of the weather brought in by the 1938 hurricane. This book has been out less than a week and already in some places it has sold out on the basis of word of mouth; so you can take their word, and not just mine, that this is a great read.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Haunting, Provocative Delight, July 15, 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: Moon Tide: A Novel (Hardcover)

What a delight to have Moon Tide grace the bookshelves right in time for summer vacation reading! Tripp's poetic language, well-drawn imagery, and lush metaphors are captivating. How lovely to be transported into the lives of this very small, yet diverse, seaside community. This is a haunting tale of longing, loss, and dreams. Where the memories of past landscapes haunt, where the town becomes a conglomeration of year-rounders versus summer people, where nature, in the form of the Hurricane of '38, defies all. An intelligent, beautiful, and engaging read!