ALL HE EVER WANTED was a surprise for me in that before I started to read it I didn't know it was a period piece, so to speak.  Nicholas Van Tassel is a stuffy professor at a small college in New Hampshire in the early 1900s.  His stuffiness, at first, rubbed me the wrong way.  But I've been pleased with Anita Shreve's past books and was determined to keep going, despite this.  It was also a little difficult to get used to the way the book is written.  The stilted words as Nicholas tells the story of falling in love with Etna and their life together was an initial drawback, but after the first 40 or 50 pages, I was at ease with it.