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Title: Not quite historical fiction
Review: Shreve is poetic, but the storyline of Weight of Water is silly and farfetched. I loved the description of the emotions felt by Maren the Norwegian immigrant as she lands on the desolate island of Smuttynose in the 1870's. I hated the back-and-forth between Maren's story and the present day. The attempt at parellelism didn't work, and ruined the story. The contemporary characters were annoying and the ending of the book is ridiculous.Readers should understand the real history of the Smuttynose murders. The Weight of Water would have been better if it simply raised speculation of a different set of circumstances around the murders and let the reader decide. Instead, Shreve implicates a real person who, now in their grave, was most likely an innocent victim of a miserable life.
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