The Country Of The Pointed Firs
by Sarah Orne Jewett
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Book Summary Information
Author: Sarah Orne JewettEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2008-10-22
ISBN: 143850313X
Number of pages: 120
Publisher: Book Jungle
Book Reviews of The Country Of The Pointed Firs
Book Review: Gentle, perceptive picture of a particular place and its people
Summary: 4 Stars
Sarah Orne Jewett's collection of sketches of life along Maine's coast in the 1880s would probably pass as creative nonfiction if it debuted today. There is virtually no separation between author and narrator, and the subject matter isn't just taken from life, it is the life of the place she describes. It is a charming exploration of people shaped by place--and as such it delivers many satisfying aspects of a novel--character, situation, setting, dialogue, theme, with the plot being the unfolding psychology of the people and place.
The book begins with the narrator's arrival in Dunnett Landing, a village that had thrived in the seafaring era that the Industrial Age had all but eclipsed. She had visited it as a child and has returned to it for the solitude it affords a writer. At the center of the book is her landlady, Mrs. Todd, an herbalist who does brisk business as the town's pharmacist of folk remedies. Through her the narrator comes to know aged sailors whose day has passed and the people who live even more remotely than the Dunnett Landing folks, on the outlying islands. She hears of the most extreme case, a woman who had fled to the outermost island to live as a hermit for years after a disappointment in love. At a large family reunion that serves as the book's climax, the narrator sums up what she has learned about the intersection of people, time and place.
A word about this particular edition of The Country of the Pointed Firs: It is something of an enigma. The cover begins interestingly enough, a photograph of a shoal of beached rowboats, a common sight in Maine harbor towns framed by what appears to be a handwritten page from a notebook set with a brown background to the black ink. But then it gets a bit strange, with an oddly worded, unfinished description of the contents set on the first cover, and set off by even odder punctuation. Inside, it is devoid of all publishing identification and there is no dedication, there is a plain title page, followed by a contents page followed by another plain title page in a different font, and then, the first page of the book appears on the back of that, on the left side. The paper looks and feels like copier paper; in fact, it looks like it was produced on a photocopier. There is a catalogue listing for other minor classic texts produced by the same publisher and the descriptions are, again, oddly worded. That said, aside from a couple of offset lines and odd treatment of punctuation here and there, I had the sense that the text was ultimately complete.
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