I acquired a copy of The Pilot’s Wife by Anita Shreve from the Little Free Library at my local Starbucks here in Salt Lake City, Utah.  According to the fly page, it originally came from the Bumpers Library, Camp Joseph T. Robinson in North Little Rock, Arkansas.  It is also stamped “Property of the U.S. Army.”  This copy has not been dog-eared but the pages are aged and yellow.  I love the smell of an aging tome.

I searched for information on the author, and it appears that Anita Shreve has passed into the ether.  She published nineteen works of fiction and two non-fiction.  This particular title was chosen to be in the 1999 Oprah Winfrey’s Book Club.

This is a Contemporary Fiction novel that could narrowly cross over into Romance due to having a romantic subtext to the plot, though it is a rather small carryover.  The author gives much more time to the well developed plot than to the romance for which this reviewer is glad.  Romance is a genre that is not one that I naturally gravitate toward.  The closest I usually stray is Contemporary Fiction and Young Adult.

This book explores the question, how well do you truly know those with which you share your life and your home?  A knock on the door in the small hours of the morning can change your world forever.

The main character, Kathryn, suffers loss and a continuing spiral of mysterious circumstances that takes her halfway around the world where everything she ever knew unraveled like an old sweater.  The entire book builds up a tantalizing tale, but the ending left me a flat.  The story was woven like a fine silk web and then abruptly it was over and there was an afterthought of what seemed like one year later.

As I stated, I did enjoy the book, I just wish there was more meat at the end.

Coming next: The Zombie Survival Guide by Max Brooks