Changes

|title=Body Surfing

|author=Anita Shreve

|date=March 2007

|isbn=978-0316730693

}}

Sydney Sklar has a most unfortunate marital history. Her first husband was an air racer. Initially Sydney found the races exhilarating and then she found them frightening. Eventually she could take no more and the couple divorced. Andrew was sad to see her go, but didn't offer to give up air racing. Her second husband was a doctor - a much safer prospect. After only eight months of marriage a brain aneurism left him dead on the floor of one of the best teaching hospitals in the world. Numb with shock and not yet thirty Sydney took a job tutoring an eighteen-year-old girl at her parents' beach house in New Hampshire. She lived as one of the family, a part of it but somehow apart. ''Body Surfing'' is the story of the summer she lived in the house and afterwards.

I loved the people. They somehow got under my skin. Sydney is an inspirational heroine - resilient despite all that happens to her and prepared to look to the future. Even relatively minor characters are fully-fleshed: Mr Edwards, kindly and unassuming in contrast to his wife, inclined to bitchiness and being difficult. It's small touches such as the minister we never meet who leaves a motoring magazine on the bathroom floor. I missed all these people when I finished the book and I wanted to know how they got on.

My thanks to the lovely people at Little, Brown who sent this book.