A review by laura_trap
The Country of the Pointed Firs and Other Stories by Sarah Orne Jewett

3.0

I was not overly fond of this book. Now that's out of the way, I can say I enjoyed the layout of the novel, in that they were various snippets, almost vignette in nature, regarding the various denizens of Dunnet's Landing, a fictional town in Maine. But as a Maine native, I can say the accent the writer mimic in the book is SPOT ON. This isn't my usual style of writing - it's very quintessential nineteenth century American. In some ways it was reading a book by Mark Twain, except we were talking about New England instead of Life on the Mississippi. Nevertheless, I have done my duty and read this book concerning characters that so closely resemble people I know here. The stern lobstermen and the hardy women. I have to say that I did enjoy that, as this type of book is a rarety from that time. The narrator, although nameless, was a woman and most of the stories center around women in the town. It frequently mentions that there were more women than men, because the men went off into the sea as sailors and rarely returned. I thought that was an interesting perspective, especially since this book came from a woman's point of view and describes some of the hardships that come with that. Overall, it was good. As with most American literature, nature and the land takes a very important role within the confines of the story, and Jewett's book is no different. Here, Maine and the landscape, where the fir trees reach down to touch the rocky sea's shapes the characters instead of the other way around. The colorful and sometimes stormy world around the narrator is both an adventure and an adversary. Yet, still there were times when the book was slow and unresponsive, there was little action. There was no device within the narrative that moved the reader forward other than the narrator's descriptions and thoughts, which left for a dry read.