A fictional ship, The Narwhal, heads up to Greenland and the Canadian Artic to search for the remains of John Franklin and his crew. It is the mid-1800's. The civil war has not yet begun, and no one knows whether there is an open artic ocean. The story is narrated by Mr. Wells, the ship's naturalist and the commander's future brother-in-law. He is a flawed 19th century gentleman who struggles to reclaim his life and to understand what he has experienced.

This book is a page-turner in the best sense of the word. I stayed up late three nights in a row because I wanted to know what happened. More than that, I felt my own life slip away as I joined the crew of the Narwhal, so convincing was Barrett's portrayal. Isn't that why we read fiction? Perhaps one more reason: to see our world differently when we close the covers. This book satisfies that demand as well.

It is nourishing, thought-provoking and beautifully written. One of the best modern American novels in recent years.

All I ask is that you read the first paragraph. After that, you're hooked. Or perhaps harpooned. From the first captivating phrases, the reader is absorbed into a world of terrible cold and beauty, against which is played a 98.6 degree drama of survival and ambition. It's a story that pits one man's singular quest for glory against an entire crew's natural survival instinct. It's told primarily from the viewpoint of Erasmus Wells, a naturalist who has spent most of his life in failure and retreat and who sees the Narwhal as his long-sought vehicle of redemption. The Narwhal sets sail ostensibly on the trail of Sir John Franklin's doomed expedition to find a northwest passage to the Pacific Ocean. But the real mission is broader: to accrue glory to the commander and driving force of the voyage, Erasmus' future brother-in-law, Zechariah Voorhees. When things don't go quite his way early on, Zeke puts in motion events that ultimately put the entire crew in peril. Narcissistic, single-minded, charismatic and paranoid, Zeke can't help but remind one of Captain Queeg in his more lucid moments. The unstated struggle between Zeke and Erasmus and the consequences of adhering to ingrained hierarchies is fascinating to observe. These human struggles play out against a white backdrop of frozen beauty. Cold like few of us on the Internet are likely to experience firsthand. Cold that will freeze your flesh right on the bone. In this land, the ice moves slowly but God help you if it catches you. In the end, this is a story of redemption, written with grace and authenticity. I loved it.

To suggest this is an adventure novel would be to suggest that Heart of Darkness was an adventure novel. Rather, it is a remakbable journey into the souls of men and an exploration of the human struggles that draw people together and tear them apart. Barrett's book doesn't waste words hand feeding the reader every detail of the journey, but rather allows us to feel the impact of events by sharing the emotional toll they take on the characters. This refreshing approach flies in the face of modern day Harrison Ford heroes whose struggle against evil is blazed in black and white decisions and death-defying physical feats. Narwhal's characters face impossible choices, their struggles against natural forces are more often lost than won, and for each and every decision, the weight of lives and relationships hangs in the balance. An amazingly real and gripping journey it is, and one that was an absolute joy to read.

I can't imagine anyone actually getting through this book. I had the feeling it was going nowhere a third of the way in. Generic characters dressed up to resemble something closer to life, plodding pace, pointless events (many of them spent in fast food places), dreary dialogue. It's supposed to be about a dying ex-monk who wants to go back to his old monastery (now sunk beneath a dammed lake), but why he feels compelled to make the journey, what dying and old age are like, what this man feels or knows, his history, have all eluded this writer who makes do with "sensitive" writing. This puts her in the ranks of so many deservedly unread writers of sensibility we seem to be churning out in great numbers. Andrea, my advice is to write only when you have something to say.

The Forms of Water advances the use of metaphor into an elaborate understanding the states of life. I saw elements of the characters in myself (sometimes unsettlingly so), and I understood the meaning of various forms of water that may seem to some a remote reference, but can also draw one deeper into the significance of the story. I read it straight through, unable to stop.

This book is really about the effect of the early death of parents on the subsequent generations. Brendan is a secondary character; his journey is the wheel around which the book turns. The true protagonists of the book are the following 2 generations, whose lives are profoundly disturbed by the early deaths of Brendan's brother and sister-in-law. I kept thinking about this book long after I'd finished it.

After just over two months of struggling with this boring, inspsid, uninspiring novel, I finally sent it flying out the window into a convenient rainstorm last week. It's not so much that it's a BAD book, really (although insipid is probably the best word I can think of to describe it), it's just that it's been done so much better. Okay, here's the scenario. Young girl from small town is swept off her feet by cosmopolitan socialite, gets pregnant, gets married, finds out that life married to cosmopolitan socialite ain't that great, has kid, leaves cosmopolitan socialite, cos. so. marries second wife, first wife and daughter heal rift. Hmmmm. We've never heard THAT one before.

Once again, we have an overused half-baked plot, and we have a convenient piece of excellent work to hold it up against. If you want a dysfunctional family circus, it's hard to do better than Michael Cunningham's _Flesh and Blood_. It's good that people try, because eventually someone _will_ write a better, funnier, sadder, more intimate novel than Cunningham's, but the discerning reader will realize, by now, that in order to find the bigger pearl, one will be reading a whole lot of swine.

I read this book because it was recommended as one I might like by Amazon. Reader, beware. This book was pretty much a waste of time, set in a rather uninteresting Cape Cod, with inadequate character development and no plot to speak of. Probably fresher when it was new.

Andrea Barrett has written a number of books. Nowhere is there anything I can find about who she is; what is her background;what is her education; why does she write, etc.

My biggest complaint about this book is that the end leaves you hanging on. There is no good closure. Usually i like to have a sense of conclusion, but this has to be one of the most abrupt endings i recall.

I don't particularly like to read about this topic, depressed economy and uneducated people trying to make ends meet while drinking heavily (a personal bias of mine), but someone else might find the book some virtues.

I was transported by this story of Reba, the musically gifted daughter of a musically gifted chicken farmer. Yes, the setting is rough; the towns are small, the people are poor, but there is huge beauty in this small setting. So many plot elements affected me; her early years singing in church while stoned on hash, the story of her pregnancy, her painful relationship with her lonely brother, her self-expiating string of affairs with married men.

Reba's lovers see her as a naive poor girl, easy pickings, not important. She's exploited in a painfully real way, seduced as much by their privilege as by their sexual advances. Novels that include an examination of the American class structure make me uncomfortable. I think that's the point.

But this isn't polemic; it's a lovely and realistic story. The peripheral characters, mostly her family members, are sketched in all their weird beauty; a sister with Down's syndrome who writes a poetic epic, her lonely brother, barely able to master his own desire for Reba, her absent father, her mechanical mother.

I don't know anything about musical theory, about scales and chords, but this novel actually communicated how the world is percieved by the musically oriented. This novel is beautifully-written without ever becoming self-consciously poetic. Every word in here works.