Set in a working-class town on the Rhode Island coast, O'Nan's latest
is a crushing, beautifully written, and profoundly compelling novel
about sisters, mothers, and daughters, and the terrible things love
makes us do.
In the first line of Ocean State, we learn that a high school student
was murdered, and we find out who did it. The story that unfolds from
there with incredible momentum is thus one of the build-up to and
fall-out from the murder, told through the alternating perspectives of
the four women at its heart. Angel, the murderer, Carol, her mother, and
Birdy, the victim, all come alive on the page as they converge in a
climax both tragic and inevitable. Watching over it all is the
retrospective testimony of Angel's younger sister Marie, who reflects on
that doomed autumn of 2009 with all the wisdom of hindsight.
Angel and Birdy love the same teenage boy, frantically and single
mindedly, and are compelled by the intensity of their feelings to
extremes neither could have anticipated. O'Nan's expert hand paints a
fully realized portrait of these women, but also weaves a compelling and
heartbreaking story of working-class life in Ashaway, Rhode Island.
Propulsive, moving, and deeply rendered, Ocean State is a masterful
novel by one of our greatest storytellers.
