Strawberries in the sea

ISBN: 0070476217

Author: Ogilvie, Elisabeth

Condition: Used

If you think you're awkward and plain, you won't believe your mirror, even if it tells you a very different story. So it is with Rosa Fleming. Shy and big for her age even as a child, she stuck close to her widowed father, a Maine lobsterman, throughout her growing years, and was as much at home in the rough seas and swirling fog as any man who lobstered for a living. No wonder, then, that when the dazzling Connall Fleming, in every way the antithesis of what she thinks she is, wants to marry her, she skips to the altar. Wiser heads in the village think Con isn't worth the tail of a mackerel, and not half good enough for Rosa, so nobody but Rosa is very surprised when he asks for a divorce to marry a pretty girl he thinks he's gotten pregnant.

Desolate at the loss of a rare and precious part of her life, Rosa navigates the tricky run to Bennett's Island in the family lobster boat, hoping in her desperation and defeat to hide from any world she has ever known.

She is young and healthy and shortly discovers that life has no intention of passing her by, even in a remote spot like Bennett's Island. There are people who have lived on the island, summer after summer, and known Rosa as a child; there are teenage girls who come around to visit and to plead with her to play the guitar which hangs on the wall of the shack she has borrowed from Jude Webster; there are young lobstermen, not all of whom welcome her setting traps in their territory. There is a climactic fight between the lobstermen and the invading purse seiners which involves Rosa in a relationship with a man which is at once degrading and yet restores her pride and dignity in herself.

The ugly duckling is very nearly a swan, as Elisabeth Ogilvie quietly closes her 27th book.