Shelter

This book is amazing, Philips's words ring like poetry and the variety of her vocabulary and structure when she writes from the different characters' point of view is stunning. Once you get to know the people in the book, you don't even have to read the title of the chapter to know who is talking. She writes from the perspective of Lenny and Alma, two sisters at camp, Buddy, a small boy who follows them around, and Parson who lives in a shack near the camp. Throughout the story they are beautifully linked together. I would highly recommend this book!

This searing, sometimes gothic coming-of-age story is written in luminous prose. No surprise here, for Jayne Anne Phillips has done it before in "Machine Dreams," a novel nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Lenny and her younger sister, Alma, are spending the summer at Camp Shelter, a West Virginia Girl Guides retreat. However, rather than spending their days swimming, hiking, and singing around campfires, they undergo an astonishing rite of passage. Their idyll is interrupted by Carmody, a drunken ex-convict who abuses his young son, Buddy, and another ex-convict, Parson, a sick soul given to delusional religious visions. Through the collision of these antithetical characters, the author explores the existence of good and evil, family relationships, and generational differences. Jayne Anne Phillips often wields a poet's pen, endowing her prose with a richness of observation and crystalline clarity of words. "Shelter" is a unique literary coup. - Gail Cooke

For devotees of Phillips' writing style, this is a must-have item. This work, more than any others truly exemplifies her rather unique way with words. No other living author could render such a poetic description of urinals; it is, alas, simply too beautiful to describe. This wonderful book is less about plot and characterization than about the pure joy of indulging oneself in Phillips' marvelously arcane prose. Happily, for the devoted fan, there are quite a few copies on the market, although why anyone would even think of discarding such a marvelous work of art is a complete mystery to me. This is a truly unique author at her very best. Excelsior!

Phillips' words probe the uncharted depths of young-seeming souls with remarkable honesty, almost with a gentle clinical attitude. Few modern authors I know of have the ability to express what happens when friendship turns to interdependence, when fear dismisses all reasoning. How can anyone describe what a young child feels when he sees and hears things beyond his understanding? Phillips effectively feels out the emotion in her characters, and turns what could be hokey or mildly interesting subject matter into a beautiful work of literature. This novel has the effect of suddenly walking into a watery patch of shadow on a hot summer's day, and all at once feeling the hairs rise on your bare arms. It draws the dark depths of a wholesome summer camp up to the light and creates more dark power than yet another "gothic" novel about vampires or curses spanning a millenium. _Shelter_ requires more than one read to absorb all its dark beauty and the incredibly powerful,poetic language the author uses. One tends to read quickly the first time, to discover the plot as it unfolds through brief vignettes given through the eyes of the various characters. Phillips is a wonderful writer with an unbelievable genius for observation and sensitivity.

_Shelter_ by Jayne Anne Phillips, is an extremely well written novel but I can't say I completely understood it. There is so much to this novel that it is difficult to take it all in after only one reading. For example, symbolism abounds but I'm not clear what is being symbolized. "Shelter" is a girls summer camp in sweltering hot West Virginia in July, 1963. But instead of being a 'shelter' the charcters, mostly children, actually lose their innocence in an unusual rite of passage. They make a choice as to how they will deal with a killing of another human being but they keep it to themselves, never trusting the adults. There were so many ideas that left me with an inquiry instead of an insight. Why didn't they tell the adults? What did the ancient writing on the walls of the cave mean? How did Parsons fit in? A good book but I'm still puzzling over it.