Seven Moves

I bought this book in a tiny little bookstore in northern Vermont, while frantically searching for a book to keep me occupied on a boat for 4 hours while my husband fished to his hearts content. I picked this wonderful treasure of a book quickly, and without really knowing what it was about. It was fantastic. This book is like talking to a very good friend over coffee. Cliche although it might be, Anshaw makes you laugh and cry all within the same paragraph. The relationship between the two lovers is so perfectly explained and heartwrenchingly understood by the way in which Anshaw writes easily and without pretense. Please read this. My four hours on that boat were more enjoyable than I ever would have thought possible, all because of "Seven Moves". Thank you for this book, and please hurry up and write again.

I picked up Seven Moves at my favorite book store in NYC and found a shaded bench in Washington Square Park and started to read. Within the course of a day, with some interruptions and the ride home, I finished it, wiping my eyes dry. There's the wonderful feeling of finding and being with the love of your life. There's the type of mystery of learning that you really might not know your partner. There's the hurt that she didn't trust you. There's a kind of failure for being blind to signals for help. Then there's the feeling of the inevitable and of moving on with your life knowing that each new experience will take you, regretfully, farther away from the present. Carol Anshaw does this in a mere 220 pages with well-crafted sentences, carefully using words that evoke the imagination and the heart. She takes you from the present to the past with flashbacks that reveal the strengh and weakness of relationships, exploring characters. One day after I finished Seven Moves, I picked it up and started reading it again, marking some of the most touching and insightful sentences I've every read.

READ THIS BOOK! I agree with the reviewer who suggested that Oprah select SEVEN MOVES for her book club, as work of this caliber deserves the widest possible audience. I found the comparisons to Updike and Tyler to be superficial, however, and found myself thinking of THE DEEP END OF THE OCEAN. Anshaw, like Mitchard, maps the territory of grief in authentic, haunting language that is poetic, and humorous in the way only real experience can be. Anyone who has ever laughed at themselves about their own "Job-like" afflictions will appreciate how devoid this story is of easy answers, cheap sentiment, and common psycho-babble. On a more conventional note, the evocation of a Morocco with which she is not intimate also had me whistling through my teeth in admiration. Most often,when an author's writing pulls me out of the story, I am reaching for my imaginary blue pencil. In this case, it was the far rarer impulse to underline a breath-taking section of prose. Thank you, Carol Anshaw, and I only hope the wait for your next novel is not too long.

Having more or less completed a reading of this text, I just HAVE to say that I found it so gripping, I was up until 2am at times...IT WOULDN'T let me go! What mesmerized me the most was the skill at which Anshaw involves us with these characters and the turbulent, touching, emotional and 'everyday' minefield through which many tread... I'm off to read 'Aquamarine'...:-) S

Carol Anshaw's Seven Moves is an excellent and involving book that I recommend to everyone--and particularly to lesbians in search of first-class books that include us. Seven Moves can be emotionally difficult at times, as the book deals with the main character's frightening sense and reality of loss. It is also fascinating and different: the lesbian character, while completely real, is not what one might guess. Most importantly, Seven Moves stayed with me. I found myself rushing appointments to get home and go back to reading it. (Make sure to also check out Anshaw's brilliant book Aquamarine.) Thanks to Carol Anshaw, if you ever see this.