BookLife Review: The Stars are Fire, by Anita Shreve
historical novel, Maine, friendship, natural disaster, wildfire, romance, concert pianist
Based on the 1947 Maine coastal wildfire, in The Stars Are Fire, author Anita Shreve (@anitashreve) (author of The Pilot’s Wife) crafts a rebirth tale, a phoenix literally rising from the ashes. Together with her friend, protagonist Grace, five months pregnant, flees her coastal home to the beach with her 2 year old daughter and five month old baby. Resourceful, Grace wets blankets and burrows with her children in the sand at the water's edge. Her husband is a surveyor, away and enlisted to help battle the wildfire. Everything burns. Survivors are homeless. Grace’s widowed mother also survives and boards with friends.
Grace and her children experience the kindness of strangers before making their way to her previously unkind, but deceased, mother-in-law's abandoned home. The wildfire ravaged the area where her husband was working, but his status is unknown. After a short visit from a handsome boarder, and through her mother's own Depression-era resourcefulness with sewing and knitting and Grace's first-ever job in a doctor's office, Grace begins to experience a level of growth and freedom that had been absent in her tepid marriage. Just when she is beginning to recover and feel confident and competent, her scarred and bitter husband returns, raging at his fate and venting on Grace.
A story of surviving disaster, resourcefulness, Yankee ingenuity and women supporting women makes this a good read with a few twists. The awe arising from the powerful stories of those who live through this natural disaster and persevere outweigh the trope-y decoy love, particularly because the heroine saves herself, and refuses to be a damsel in distress.