Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)I've been going to Long Beach Island for a little over 15 years and so many of the parts of this book made me feel like I was there. Not just the visual descriptions - I could smell it and feel the changes in weather and season. It also introduced me to parts of the place that I don't know about. And to people (characters) who are delightful, interesting, funny and quirky. It reminded me of Cannery Row before I read the same thing someplace else - the characters and the time, a place in transition, people holding on and connecting, but hiding and processing their past. I've given the book as a gift to everyone I know who loves the place or who I wish would love it. Check it out - then go find the other books Mr. Savadove has contributed to and experience the photographer's and the historian's perspective as well.
Click Here to see more reviews about: The Oyster Singer
Tourists and summer residents flock to the resort beaches every summer season, passing, but barely noticing, a rag-tag collection of accidental bungalows along the bay known as Mud City. It is here, on this abandoned stretch of marshland, that lost lives wash up like driftwood. They float and intersect like debris in tidal currents, and sometimes, when conditions are just right, they connect.In this episodic novel, cats are trained to dive for fish; a boat-builder is holed up in an abandoned fishmeal factory making old-fashioned sneakboxes by hand (though nobody wants his craftsmanship anymore); a huge jetty boulder is stolen; and a party is held on an island that vanishes at high tide. The protagonist, Lum, not quite a hero, quotes Lincoln, tells stories, and can perform a kind of yodeling-bagpipe call that brings oysters up out of the bay. He thinks he's found his place in the world, and people respond to Lum with their own stories. As histories are shared a community of no-longer-lost souls forms - except for those who want to take that place away.When a body is found floating in Mud City, a quest for the perpetrators is launched in the mysterious pinelands, and the tone is set for changes to come. Ultimately, as with all coastal property, a developer sees the potential in real estate, and the squatters must chose to leave or fight.Evocative, poetic descriptions of the shore and its seasons slip between the stories as the two main characters - Lum and Ging, a man and a woman - drift around one another, now pulled together, now pushed apart. The Oyster Singer is a novel about second chances and soulmates, love lost and found, adventurers, drifters, developers and dreamers, in a place called Mud City on a shore bound for change. And -- in the midst of change and vulnerability -- the permanence that may be possible when people find each other and discover where they belong.
