Absolutely nothing happens in this book and I love it. ( )

My review has disappeared.
And has been found: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2347137.The_Country_of_the_Pointed_Firs?ac=1...

apparently I never wrote a review for the other stories in this edition and only posted for the main story. ( )

I'm not sure how to categorize this -- it's literary fiction, and quite beautiful literary fiction at that, but it reads like a quiet and cadenced memoir and it's a novel made up of short stories. Sarah Orne Jewett's language is a delight, and something about the structure and the telling makes the reader feel as though they are the mysterious visitor, writing, observing, and ever enjoying Mrs. Todd and her circle of community. It's a beautiful respite to visit Dunnett's Landing -- a story from a different space and time, one, I think, that was fading even as the book was written. Lovely, and like stepping through a window into historical Maine, or any secluded seaside town. ( )

I came across a description of this book somewhere somehow and it somehow got my attention and I said to myself you should probably read this. Since I don't read a lot of fiction I decided yes it's for your own good. So I read it. And I went back and forth on whether it was a waste of my time. Overall it added to my thinking it was worthwhile.

Written apparently around the turn of the last century it depicts the experience of a woman on a summer vacation type stint somewhere up in Maine along the rocky coast there. The woman she stays with is a fixture in the community of plain clannish types supported primarily be a seagoing and fishing workforce.

Individual stories of some of these individuals is laid out in an enticing enough way to keep ones interest. Of special note was a woman who lived entirely by herself out in the remote due to a past incident in her life there. Having past on she is still somewhat memorialized by the locals. It winds up with a reunion of many of the related people and finally a old man who live the previous woman lives alone and mourns his wife eternally.

The sense of life as it was in those days and how it does or does not relate to how we conduct our lives today with our rampant and intrusive technology was the impression this work left me with. Also how the human drams continues to play out much like the past no matter how the present plays itself out. ( )

this has been on my to-read list for years, and i finally picked it up this fall. i've only just read the main novella; i'd really like to read the stories after it, but i'm just not in a place to do that with any reasonable speed right now. i really wanted to be absorbed by this more than i was, and maybe i will be some other time - it wasn't as plot driven as the stuff i've been reading lately, and i had to force myself to get chapters done here and there. maybe next time! ( )