Excerpt from Fortune's Rocks by Anita Shreve, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

"Josiah has prepared a tray," her mother says, gesturing to the display of paste sandwiches.

Olympia sits at the edge of the chaise. Her mothers knees make small hillocks in the indigo landscape of her skirt. "I am not hungry," Olympia says, which is true.

"You must eat something. Dinner will not be for hours yet."

To please her mother, Olympia takes a sandwich from the tray. For the moment, she avoids her mother's acute gaze and studies her room. They do not have their best furnishings at Fortune's Rocks, because the sea air and the damp are ruinous to their shape and surface. But Olympia does like particularly her mother's skirted dressing table with its many glass and silver boxes, which contain her combs and her perfumes and the fine white powder she uses in the evenings. Also on the dresser are her mother's many medicines and tonics. Olympia can see, from where she sits, the Pigeon Milk, the Pennyroyal Pills, the Ginger Tonic and Johnson's Lineament.

For as long as Olympia can remember, her mother has been referred to, within her hearing and without, as an invalid—an appellation that does not seem to distress her mother and indeed appears to be one she herself cultivates. Her ailments are vague and unspecific, and Olympia is not certain she has ever been properly diagnosed. She is said to have sustained a back injury as a girl, and Olympia has heard the phrase "liver ailment" tossed about from time to time. There is, in Boston, a physician who visits her frequently, and perhaps he is not the charlatan Olympia's father thinks him. Although even as a girl, Olympia was certain that Dr. Ulysses Branch visited her mother for her company rather than for her rehabilitation. Her mother never seems actually to be unwell, and Olympia sometimes thinks about the term invalid as it is applied to her mother: invalid, in valid, not valid, as though, in addition to physical strength, her mother lacked a certain authenticity.

As a result of these vague disabilities, Olympia's mother is not the caretaker in the family, but rather the one cared for. Olympia has decided that this must suit both of her parents well enough, for neither of them has ever taken great pains to amend the situation. And, as time has gone on, perhaps as a result of actual atrophy, her mother has become something of a valid invalid. She seldom leaves the house, except to have her husband walk her at dusk to the seawall, where she will sit and sing to him. For years, her mother has maintained that the sea air has a salubrious effect on both her spirits and her vocal cords. Despite the humidity, she keeps a piano at Fortune's Rocks as well and will occasionally leave her rooms and play with some accomplishment. Olympia's mother has wonderful bones, but Olympia will not inherit her face or the shape of her body or, thankfully, the brittleness of her spirit.

Olympia's mother, who met her father in Boston at a dinner arranged by her own father when she was twenty-three, did not marry until she was twenty-eight. Although she was considered a handsome woman, it was said that her nerves, which were self-effacing to a degree of near annihilation, rendered her too delicate for marriage. Olympia's father, ever one for a challenge and captivated by those very characteristics that frightened other men away—that is to say, her mother's alternating fugue-like states of intense quiet and imaginative flights of fancy—pursued her with an ardor that he himself seldom admits to. Olympia does not know what to make of her parents? married life, for her mother appears to be, though sensitive to a fault, the least physical of all women, and oftentimes, if surprised, can be seen to flinch at her husband's touch. Olympia's thoughts balk, however, at crossing the veil to that forbidden place where she might be able to imagine in detail her parents? marriage. For it is a marriage that has seemed to thin as it has endured, until it appears to Olympia, by the summer of her fifteenth year, that there is only the one child and the vaguest and most formal of connections between them.

© 1999 by Anita Shreve